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EULOGY 



o I* 






JAMES MADISON. 



BY JOHN QUINCY ADAMS 



■■<■ 



AN 



EULOGY 



ON THE 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 



OF 



JAMES MADI SON, 

FOURTH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES; 

DELIVERED AT THE REQUEST OF THE 

MAYOR, ALDERMEN, AND COMMON COUNCIL 



OF THE 



CITY OF BOSTON, 



SEPTEMBER 27, 1836. 



BY JOHN QU1NCY ADAMS. 



i 



BOSTON: 
JOHN II. EASTBURN, CITY PRINTER, 



No. 18 State Street. 



1836. 






E?34 



I 



CITY OF BOSTON 



In the Board of Aldermen, September 28, 1836. 

Resolved, That the thanks of the City Council be presented to the Hon. 
John Quincy Adams, for the eloquent Eulogy delivered by him, on the 
27th instant, in the Odeon, at their request, in memory of the late venerable 
James Madison, and that a copy be requested for the press. 



Sent down for concurrence. 



SAMUEL T. ARMSTRONG, Mayor. 



I? 



Read and concurred. 



In Common Council, September 29, 1836. 
JOSIAH QUINCY, Jr., President. 



A true copy. — Attest, 

S. F. McCLEARY, City Clerk. 



EULOGY. 



When the imperial despot of Persia, surveyed 
the myriads of his vassals, whom he had assembled 
for the invasion and conquest of Greece, we are told 
by the father of profane history,* that the monarch's 
heart, at first, distended with pride, but immediately 
afterwards sunk within him, and turned to tears of 
anguish at the thought, that within one hundred 
years from that day, not one of all the countless 
numbers of his host would remain in the land of the 
living. 

The brevity of human life, had afforded a melan- 
choly contemplation to wiser and better men than 
Xer\t v s. in ages long before that of his own existence. 
It is still the subject of philosophical reflection or of 
Christian resignation, to the living man of the pres- 
ent age. It will continue such, so long as the race 
of man shall exist upon earth. 

But it is the condition of our nature to look before 
and after : The Persian tyrant looked forward, and 
lamented the shortness of life ; but in that century 
which bounded his mental vision, he knew not what 
was to come to pass, for weal or woe, to the race 
whose transitory nature he deplored, and his own 
purposes, happily baffled by the elements which he 
with absurd presumption would have chastised, were 
of the most odious and detestable character. 

* Herodotus. 



4 

Reflections upon the shortness of time allotted to 
individual man upon this planet, may be turned to 
more useful account, by connecting them with ages 
past than with those that are to come. The family 
of man is placed upon this congregated ball to earn 
an improved condition hereafter by improving his own 
condition here — and this duty of improvement is not 
less a social than a selfish principle. We are bound 
to exert all the faculties bestowed upon us by our 
Maker, to improve our own condition, by improving 
that of our fellow men, and the precepts that we 
should love our neighbor as ourselves, and that we 
should do to others as we would that they should do 
unto us, are but examples of that duty of co-opera- 
tion to the improvement of his kind, which is the first 
law of God to man, unfolded alike in the volumes of 
nature and of inspiration. 

Let us look back then for consolation from the 
thought of the shortness of human life, as urged upon 
us by the recent decease of James Madison, one of 
the pillars and ornaments of his country and of his 
age. His time on earth was short, yet he died full 
of years and of glory — less, far less than one hundred 
years have elapsed since the day of his birth — yet 
has he fulfilled, nobly fulfilled, his destinies as a man 
and a Christian. He has improved his own condi- 
tion by improving that of his country and his kind. 

He was born in Orange County in the British Col- 
ony of Virginia on the 5th of March, 1750; or ac- 
cording to the computation of time by the Gregorian 
Calender, adopted the year after that of his birth, on 
the 16th of March 1751, of a distinguished and opu- 
lent family ; and received the earl) elements of edu- 
cation parti) at a public school under the charge ol 



Donald Robertson, and afterwards in the paternal 
mansion under the private tuition of the Rev. Thomas 
Martin ; l>\ whose instructions he was prepared for 
admission at Princeton College. 

There arc three stages in the history of the North 
American Revolution — The first of which may be 
considered as commencing with the order of the 
British Council for enforcing the acts of trade in 
1760, and as having reached its crisis at the meeting 
of the first Congress fourteen years after at Phila- 
delphia. It was a struggle for the preservation and 
recovery of the rights and liberties of the British 
Colonies. It terminated in a civil war, the character 
and object of which were changed by the Declaration 
of Independence. \ 

The second stage is that of the War of Indepen- 
dence, usually so called — but it began fifteen months 
before the Declaration, and was itself the immediate 
cause and not the effect of that event. It closed by 
the preliminary Treaty of Peace concluded at Paris 
on the 30th of November, 1782. 

The third is the formation of the Anglo-American 
People and Nation of North America. This event 
was completed by the meeting of the first Congress 
of the United States under their present Constitution 
of the 4th of March, 1789. Thirty years is the 
usual computation for the duration of one generation 
of the human race. The space of time from 1760 
to 1790 includes the generation with which the North 
American Revolution began, passed through all its 
stages and ended. 

The attention of the civilized European world and 
perhaps an undue proportion of our own has been 
drawn to the second of these three stages — to the 



6 

contest with Great Britain for Independence. It 
was an arduous and apparently a very unequal con- 
flict. But it was not without example in the annals 
of mankind. It has often been remarked that the 
distinction between rebellion and revolution consists 
only in the event, and is marked only by difference 
of success. But to a just estimate of human affairs 
there are other elementary materials of estimation. 
A revolution of government to the leading minds by 
which it is undertaken is an object to be accomplish- 
ed. William Tell, Gustavus Vasa, William of 
Orange, had been the leaders of revolutions, the ob- 
ject of which had been the establishment or the re- 
covery of popular liberties. But in neither of those 
cases had the part performed by those individuals 
been the result of deliberation or design. The 
sphere of action in all those cases was incomparably 
more limited and confined, the geographical aimen- 
sions of the scene narrow and contracted — the polit- 
ical principles brought into collisions of small compass 
— no foundations'of the social compact to be laid — no 
people to be formed — the popular movement of the 
American revolution had been preceded by a foresee- 
ing and directing mind. I mean not to say by one 
mind ; but by a pervading mind, which in a preced- 
ing age had inspired the prophetic verses of Berkley, 
and which may be traced back to the first Puritan 
settlers of Plymouth and of Massachusetts Bay. 
" From the first Institution of the Company of Mas- 
sachusetts Bay," says Dr. Robertson, " its members 
seem to have been animated with a spirit of innova- 
tion in civil policy as well as in religion : and by the 
habit of rejecting established usages in the one, the\ 
were prepared for deviating from them in the other. 



They had applied for a royal charter, in order to give 
legal effect to their operations in England, as acts of 
a body politic ; but the persons whom thej sent out 
to America as soon as they landed there, considered 
themselves as individuals, united together by volun- 
tary association, possessing the natural right of men 
who form a society to adopt what mode of govern- 
ment and to enact what laws the) deemed most con- 
ducive to general felicity." 

And such had continued to be the prevailing spirit 
of the people of New England from the period of 
their settlement to that of the revolution. The 
people of Virginia too, notwithstanding their primi- 
tive loyalty, had been trained to revolutionary doc- 
trines and to warlike habits ; by their frequent col- 
lisions with Indian wars ; by the convulsions of 
Bacon's rebellion, and by the wars with France, of 
which their own borders were the theatre, down 
to the close of the war which immediately preceded 
that of the revolution. The contemplation and the 
defiance of danger, a qualification for all great enter- 
prise and achievement upon earth, was from the very 
condition of their existence, a property almost univer- 
sal to the British Colonists in North America, and 
hardihood of body, unfettered energy of intellect and 
intrepidity of spirit, fitted them for trials, which the 
feeble and enervated races of other ages and climes 
could never have gone through. 

For the three several stages of this new r Epocha 
in the earthly condition of man, a superintending 
Providence had ordained that there should arise from 
the native population of the soil, individuals with 
minds organized and with spirits trained to the exi- 
gencies of the times, and to the successive aspects of 



8 

the social state. In the contest of principle which 
originated with the attempt of* the British Govern- 
ment to burden their Colonies with taxation by act 
of Parliament, the natural rights of mankind found 
efficient defenders in James Otis, Patrick Henry, 
John Dickinson, Josiah Quincy, Benjamin Franklin, 
Arthur Lee and numerous other writers of inferior 
note. As the contest changed its character, Samuel 
and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were among 
the first who raised the standard of Independence 
and prepared the people for the conflict through 
which they were to pass. For the contest of physi- 
cal force by arms, Washington, Charles Lee, Put- 
nam, Green, Gates, and a graduation of others of in- 
ferior ranks had been prepared by the preceding 
wars — by the conquest of Canada and by the previ- 
ous capture of Louisburg. From the beginning of 
the war, every action was disputed with the perse- 
verance and tenacity of veteran combatants, and the 
minute men of Lexington and Bunker's Hill were as 
little prepared for flight at the onset as the Macedo- 
nian phalanx of Alexander or the tenth legion of 
Julius Caesar. 

But the great work of the North American revolu- 
tion was not in the maintenance of the rights of the 
British Colonies by argument, nor in the conflict of 
physical force by war. The Declination of Indepen- 
dence annulled the national character of the Ameri- 
can people. That character had been common to 
them all as subjects of one and the same sovereign, 
and that sovereign was a king. Tin; dissolution of 
that tie was pronounced by one act common to them 
all, and it left them as members of distinct communi- 
ties in the relations towards each other, bound only 



by the obligations of the law of nature and of the 
Union. In which they had renounced their connexion 
with the mother coiintn . 

But what was to he the condition of their national 
existence? This was the problem of difficult solu- 
tion for them; and this was the opening of the new 
era in the science of government and in the history 
of mankind. 

Their municipal governments were founded upon 
the common law of England, modified by their re- 
spective charters; by the Parliamentary law of Eng- 
land so far as it had been adopted by their usages, 
and by the enactments of their own Legislative as- 
semblies. This was a complicated system of law, 
and has formed a subject of much internal perplexity 
to many of the States of the Union, and in several of 
them continues unadjusted to this day. By the 
common consent of all, however, this was reserved 
for the separate and exclusive regulation of each State 
within itself. 

As a member of the community of nations, it was 
also agreed that they should constitute one body — 
"Epluribus unuwiP was the devise which they as- 
sumed as the motto for their common standard. And 
there was one great change from their former condi- 
tion, which they adopted with an unanimity so abso- 
lute, that no proposition of a different character was 
ever made before them. It was that all their gov- 
ernments should be republican. They were deter- 
mined not only to be separately republics, but to 
tolerate no other form of government as constituting 
a part of their community. A natural consequence 
of this determination was that they should remain 
separate independences, and the first suggestion which 



10 

presented itself to them, was that their Union should 
be merely a confederation. 

In the first and in the early part of the second 
stage of the revolution, the name of James Madison 
had not appeared. At the commencement of the 
contest he was but ten years of age. When the first 
blood was shed, here in the streets of Boston, he was 
a student in the process of his education at Princeton 
College, where the next year, 1771, he received the 
degree of bachelor of Arts. He was even then so 
highly distinguished by the power of application and 
the rapidity of his progress, that he performed all the 
exercises of the two senior Collegiate years in one — 
while at the same time his deportment was so exem- 
plary, that Dr. Witherspoon, then at the head of that 
College, and afterwards himself one of the most emi- 
nent Patriots and Sages of our revolution, always de- 
lighted in bearing testimony to the excellency of his 
character at that early stage of his career ; and said 
to Thomas Jefferson long afterwards, when they 
were all colleagues in the revolutionary Congress, 
that in the whole career of Mr. Madison at Prince- 
ton, he had never known him to say or do an indis- 
creet thing. 

Discretion in its influence upon the conduct of 
men is the parent of moderate and conciliatory coun- 
sels, and these were peculiarly indispensable to the 
perpetuation of the American Union : and to the pros- 
perous advancement and termination of the revolution, 
precisely at the period when Mr. Madison was first 
introduced into public life. 

In 1775, among the earliest movements of tin 1 iw- 
olutionar} contest, he was a member of the Commit- 
tee of Public Safety of the County of Orange, and in 



11 

1776, of the Convention substituted for the ordinary 
Legislature of the Colony. By one of those transient 
caprices of popular favour, which sometimes influence 
elections, he was not returned to the House of Dele- 
gates in 1777, but was immediately after elected by 
that body to the Executive Council, of which he con- 
tinued a leading member till the close of the year 
1779, and was then transferred by the Legislature to 
the representation of the Commonwealth in the Con- 
tinental Congress. His first entrance into public life 
was signalized by the resolution of the Convention of 
the State, instructing their Delegates to vote for the 
Independence of the Colonies ; by the adoption of a 
declaration of rights, and by their organization of a 
State government which continued for more than half 
a century the Constitution of the Commonwealth be- 
fore it underwent the revision of the people ; an event 
in which he was destined again to take a conspicuous 
part. On the 20th of March, 1780, he took his seat 
as a delegate in the Congress of the Confederation. It 
was then, in the midst of the revolution, and under 
the influence of its most trying scenes, that his polit- 
ical character was formed, and then it was that the 
virtue of discretion, the spirit of moderation, the con- 
ciliatory temper of compromise found room for exer- 
cise in its most comprehensive extent. 

One of the provisions in the articles of Confedera- 
tion most strongly marked with that same spirit of 
Liberty, the vital breath of the contest in which our 
fathers were engaged ; the true and undying conserv- 
ative spirit by which we their children enjoy that 
Freedom which they achieved ; but which like all oth- 
er pure and virtuous principles sometimes leads to er- 
ror by its excess was that no member of this impotent 
2 



12 

Congress should hold that office more than three years 
in six. This provision however, was construed not to 
have commenced its operation until the final ratifica- 
tion of the articles by all the States on the first of 
March, 1781. Mr. Madison remained in Congress 
nearly four years from the 20th of March, 1780 till the 
first Monday in November, 1783. He was thus a 
member of that body during the last stages of the rev- 
olutionary war and for one year after the conclusion of 
the Peace. He had during that period, unceasing 
opportunities to observe the mortifying inefficiency of 
the merely federative principle upon which the Union 
of the States had been organized, and had taken 
an active part in all the remedial measures proposed 
by Congress for amending the Articles of Confedera- 
tion. 

A Confederation is not a country. There is no mag- 
net of attraction in any league of Sovereign and Inde- 
pendent States which causes the heart strings of the 
individual man to vibrate in unison with those of his 
neighbour. Confederates are not Countrymen, as the 
tie of affinity by convention can never be so close as 
the tie of kindred by blood. The Confederation of the 
North-American States was an experiment of inesti- 
mable value, even by its failure. It taught our fath- 
ers the lesson, that they had more, infinitely more to 
do than merely to achieve their Independence by War. 
That they must form their social compact upon prin- 
ciples never before attempted upon earth. That the 
Achean leagues of ancient days, the Hanseatic league 
of the middle ages, the leagues of Switzerland or of 
the Netherlands of later times, furnished no precedent 
upon which they could safely build their labouring 
plan of State. The Confederation was perhaps as 



13 

closely knit together as it was possible that such 
a form of polity could be grappled ; but it was 
matured by the State Legislatures without consultation 
with the People, and the jealousy of sectional collis- 
ions, and the distrust of all delegation of power, stamp- 
ed every feature of the work with inefficiency. 

The deficiency of powers in the Confederation was 
immediately manifested in their inability to regulate 
the commerce of the country, and to raise a revenue, 
indispensable for the discharge of the debt accumula- 
ted in the progress of the Revolution. Repeated ef- 
forts were made to supply this deficiency ; but always 
without success. 

On the 3d of February, 1781, it was recommended 
to the several States as indispensably necessary that 
they should vest a power in Congress to levy for the 
use of the United States a duty of five per cent, ad 
valorem upon foreign importations, and all prize goods 
condemned in a Court of Admiralty ; the money aris- 
ing from those duties to be appropriated to the dis- 
charge of the debts contracted for the support of the 
War. 

On the 18th of April, 1783, a new recommendation 
was adopted by Resolutions of nine States, as indis- 
pensably necessary to the restoration of public credit, 
and to the punctual and honorable discharge of the 
public debt to invest the Congress with a power to lay 
certain specific duties upon spirituous liquors, tea, su- 
gar, coffee and cocoa, and five per cent, ad valorem up- 
on all other imported articles of merchandise, to be 
exclusively appropriated to the payment of the princi- 
pal or interest of the public debt. 

And that as a further provision for the payment of 
the interest of the debt, the States themselves should 



14 

levy a revenue to furnish their respective quotas of an 
a oro T e o-ate annual sum of one million five hundred thous- 
and dollars. 

And that to provide a further guard for the payment 
of the same debts, to hasten their extinguishment, and 
to establish the harmony of the United States the sev- 
eral States should make liberal cessions to the Union 
of their territorial claims. 

With this act a Committee consisting of Mr. Mad- 
ison, Mr. Ellsworth and Mr. Hamilton was appointed 
to prepare an address to the States, which on the 26th 
of the same month was adopted, and transmitted to- 
gether with eight documentary papers, demonstrating 
the necessity that the measures recommended by the 
act should be adopted by the States. 

This address, one of those incomparable State pa- 
pers which more than all the deeds of arms, immortal- 
ized the rise, progress and termination of the North 
American revolution was the composition of James 
Madison. After compressing into a brief and lumin- 
ous summary all the unanswerable arguments to in- 
duce the restoration and maintenance of the public 
faith ; it concluded with the following solemn and pro- 
phetic admonition. 

"Let it be remembered finally, that it has ever been 
the pride and boast of America, that the rights for 
which she contended, were the rights of human na- 
ture. By the blessing of the author of these rights 
on the means exerted for their defence, they have pre- 
vailed over all opposition, and form the basis of thir- 
teen independent States. No instance has heretofore 
occurred nor can any instance be expected hereafter 
to occur, in which the unadulterated forms of republi- 
can Government can pretend to so fair an opportunity 



15 

of justifying themselves by their fruits. In this view 
the citizens of the United States are responsible for 
the greatest trust ever confided to a political society. 
If justice, good faith, honor, gratitude and all the oth- 
er qualities, which ennoble the character of a nation, 
and fulfil the ends of Government be the fruits of our 
establishments, the cause of Liberty will acquire a 
dignity and lustre which it has never yet enjoyed ; 
and an example will be set which cannot but have the 
most favorable influence on the rights of mankind. If 
on the other side, our Governments should be unfor- 
tunately blotted with the reverse of these cardinal and 
essential virtues, the great cause which we have en- 
gaged to vindicate will be dishonored and betrayed ; 
the last and fairest experiment in favor of the rights of 
human nature will be turned against them ; and their 
patrons and friends exposed to be insulted and silen- 
ced by the votaries of tyranny and usurpation." 

My countrymen ! do not your hearts burn within 
you at the recital of these words, when the retrospect 
brings to your minds the time when, and the persons 
by whom they were spoken ? Compare them with the 
closing paragraphs of the address from the first Con- 
gress of 1774, to your forefathers, the people of the 
Colonies. 

" Your own salvation and that of your posterity now 
depends upon yourselves. Against the temporary in- 
conveniences you may suffer from a stoppage of Trade, 
you will weigh in the opposite balance the endless mis- 
eries you and your descendants must endure from an 
established arbitrary power. You will not forget the 
Honor of your Country that must from your behavior 
take its title in the estimation of the world to Glory 
or to Shame ; and you will, with the deepest attention 



16 

reflect, that if the peaceable mode of opposition re- 
commended by us be broken and rendered ineffectual ; 
you must inevitably be reduced to choose either a 
more dangerous contest, or a final ruinous and infa- 
mous submission. We think ourselves bound in duty 
to observe to you that the schemes agitated against 
these Colonies have been so conducted as to render it 
prudent that you should extend your views to mourn- 
ful events and be in all respects prepared for every 
contingency." 

That was the trumpet of summons to the conflict 
of the revolution; as the address of April, 1783 was 
the note of triumph at its close. They were the first 
and the last words of the Spirit, which in the germ of 
the Colonial contest, brooded over its final fruit, the 
universal emancipation of civilized man. 

Compare them both with the opening and closing 
paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, too 
deeply riveted in your memories to need the repeti- 
tion of them by me ; and you have the unity of action 
essential to all heroic achievement for the benefit of 
mankind, and you have the character from its open- 
ing to its close ; the beginning the middle and the end 
of that unexampled, and yet unimitated moral and po- 
litical agent, the Revolutionary North American Con- 
gress. 

But the Address of 1783 marks the commencement 
of one aera in American History as well as the close 
of another. Madison, Ellsworth, Hamilton, were not 
of the Congress of 1774, nor yet of the Congress 
which declared Independence. They were of a 
succeeding generation, men formed in and by the 
revolution itself. They had imbibed the Spirit of 
the revolution, but the nature of their task was 



17 

changed. Theirs was no longer the duty to call up- 
on their countrymen to extend their views to mourn- 
ful events, and to prepare themselves for every con- 
tingency. But more emphatically than even the 
Congress o(* 1774 were they required to warn their 
fellow citizens that their salvation and that of their 
posterity depended upon themselves. 

The warfare of self-defence against foreign oppres- 
sion was accomplished. Independence, unqualified, 
commercial and political was achieved and recognised. 
But there was yet in substance no nation — no people 
— no country common to the Union. These had 
been self-formed in the heat of the common struggle 
for freedom ; and evaporated in the very success of 
the energies they had inspired. A Confederation of 
separate State Sovereignties, never sanctioned by the 
body of the people, could furnish no effective Govern- 
ment for the nation. A cold and lifeless indifference 
to the rights, the interests, and the duties of the Union 
had fallen like a palsy upon all their faculties instead 
of that almost supernatural vigor which at the origin 
of their contest had inscribed upon their banners, and 
upon their hearts "join or die." 

In November, 1783, Mr. Madison's constitutional 
term of service in Congress as limited bv the restric- 
tion in the articles of Confederation, expired. But 
his talents were not lost to his Country. He was 
elected the succeeding year a member of the Legisla- 
ture of his native State, and continued by annual elec- 
tion in that station till November, 1786, when having 
become re-eligible to Congress, he was again returned 
to that body, and on the 12th of February, 1787, re- 
sumed his seat among its members. 

In the Legislature of Virginia, his labors, during his 



18 

absence of three years from the general councils of 
the Confederacy, were not less arduous and unremit- 
ting, nor less devoted to the great purposes of revolu- 
tionary legislation, than while he had been in Con- 
gress. The Colony of Virginia had been settled under 
the auspices of the Episcopal Church of England. It 
was there the established Church ; and all other reli- 
gious denominations, there, as in England, were stig- 
matized with the name of dissenters. For the sup- 
port of this Church the Colonial laws prior to the rev- 
olution had subjected to taxation all the inhabitants of 
the Colony, and it had been endowed with grants of 
property by the Crown. The effect of this had nat- 
urally been to render the Church establishment un- 
popular, and the clergy of that Establishment general- 
ly unfriendly to the revolution. After the close of the 
War, in the year 1784, Mr. Jefferson introduced into 
the Legislature a Bill for the establishment of Reli- 
gious Freedom. The principle of the Bill was the 
abolition of all taxation for the support of Religion, or 
of its Ministers, and to place the freedom of all reli- 
gious opinions wholly beyond the control of the Legis- 
lature. These purposes were avowed, and supported 
by a long argumentative preamble. The Bill failed 
however to obtain the assent of the assembly, and in- 
stead of it they prepared and caused to be printed a 
Bill establishing a provision for teachers of the Chris- 
tian Religion. At the succeeding session of the Leg- 
islature, Mr. Jefferson was absent from the country, 
but Mr. Madison, as the champion of Religious Lib- 
erty supplied his place. A memorial and Remon- 
strance against the Bill making provision for the teach- 
ers of the Christian Religion was composed by Mr. 
Madison, and signed by multitudes of the citizens of 



19 

the Commonwealth, and the Bill drafted by Mr. Jef- 
ferson, together with its preamble, was by the influ- 
ence of his friend triumphantly carried against all op- 
position through the Legislature. 

The principle thai religious opinions are altogether 
beyond the sphere of legislative controul, is but one 
modification of a more extensive axiom, which in- 
cludes the unlimited freedom of the press ; of speech, 
and of the communication of thought in all its forms. 
An authoritative provision by law for the support of 
teachers of the Christian Religion was prescribed by 
the third Article of the Bill of Rights in the Consti- 
tution of this Commonwealth. An amendment re- 
cently adopted by the people has given their sanction 
to the opinions of Jefferson and Madison, and the 
substance of the Virginian Statute for the establish- 
ment of Religious Freedom, now forms a part of the 
Constitution of Massachusetts. That the freedom 
and communication of thoughl is paramount to all 
legislative authority, is a sentiment becoming from 
day to day more prevalent throughout the civilized 
world, and which it is fervently to be hoped will 
henceforth remain inviolate by the legislative author- 
ities not only of the Union, but of all its confeder- 
ated States. 

At the Session of 1 785, a general revisal was made 
of the Statute Laws of Virginia, and the great bur- 
den of the task devolved upon Mr. Madison as 
chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the House. 
The general principle which pervaded this operation 
was the adaptation of the civil code of the Common- 
wealth, to its republican and unfettered independence 
as a Sovereign State, and he carried it through with 
that same spirit of liberty and liberality which had 
3 



20 



dictated the Act for the establishment of Religious 
Freedom. The untiring industry, the searching and 
penetrating application, the imperturbable patience, 
the moderation and gentleness of disposition, which 
smoothed his way over the ruggedest and most thorny 
paths of life, accompanied him through this transac- 
tion as through all the rest. While a member of the 
Legislature of Virginia, he had contributed more 
than any other person to the adjustment of that vital 
interest of the Union, the disposal of the Public 
Lands. It was the collision of opinions and of in- 
terests relating to them which had delayed the con- 
clusion of the Articles of Confederation, and the 
cession afterwards made of the North Western Ter- 
ritory was encumbered with conditions which further 
delayed its acceptance. By the influence of Mr. 
Madison, the terms of the cession were so modified, 
that in conformity with them the ordinance for the 
government of the North Western Territory was 
finally adopted and established by Congress on the 
13th of July, 1787, in the midst of the labors of the 
Convention at Philadelphia, which two months later 
presented to the People of the United States for their 
acceptance, that Constitution of Government, thence- 
forth the polar star of their Union. 

The experience of four years in the Congress of 
the Confederation, had convinced Mr. Madison that 
the Union could not be preserved by means of that 
institution. That its inherent infirmity was a de- 
ficiency of power in the federal head, and that an in- 
surmountable objection to the grant of further powers 
to Congress, always arose from the adverse prejudices 
and jealousy with which the demand of them was 
urged by that body itself. The difficulty of obtain- 



21 

ing such grant of power, was aggravated by the con- 
sideration that it \\ as to be invested in those In w horn 
it was solicited, and was at the same time, and in the 
same degree, to abridge the power of those In whom 
it was to he granted. 

To avoid these obstacles it occurred to Mr. Mad- 
ison thai the agency of a distinct, delegated body, 
having no invidious interest of its own, or of its 
members, might be better adapted, deliberately to 
discuss the deficiencies of the federal compact, than 
the bod v itself by whom it was administered. 'The 
friends with whom he consulted in the Legislature of 
Virginia, concurred with him in these opinions, and 
the motion for the appointment of Commissioners to 
consider of the state of trade in the confederacy sug- 
gested by him, was made in the Legislature by his 
friend, Mr. Tyler, and carried by the weight of his 
opinions, and the exertion of his influence, without 
opposition. 

This proposition was made and Commissioners 
were appointed by the Legislature of Virginia, on the 
21st of January, 1786. The Governor of the Com- 
monwealth, Edmund Randolph, was placed at the 
head of the delegation from the State. Mr. Madi- 
son and six others, men of the first character and 
influence in the State, were the other Commission- 
ers. The meeting was held at Annapolis in Septem- 
ber, and two Commissioners from New York, three 
from New Jersey, one from Pennsylvania, three from 
Delaware, and three from Virginia, constituted the 
whole number of this Convention. Five States 
only were represented, and among them, Pennsyl- 
vania by a single member. Four States, among 



22 

whom was Maryland, the very State within which 
the Assembly was held, had not even appointed 
Commissioners and the deputies from four others, 
amons: whom was our own beloved, native Common- 
wealth, suffering, even then, the awful calamity of a 
civil war, generated by the imbecility of the federal 
compact of union, did not even think it worth while 
to give their attendance. 

Yet even in that Convention of Annapolis, was the 
gem of a better order of things. The Commission- 
ers elected John Dickinson, of Delaware, their chair- 
man, and after a session of three days, agreed upon a 
report, doubtless drafted by Mr. Madison, — address- 
ed to the Legislatures by which they had been ap- 
pointed, and copies of which were transmitted to the 
other State Legislatures and to Congress. 

In this report they availed themselves of a sugges- 
tion derived from the powers which the Legislature 
of New Jersey had conferred upon their Commission- 
ers, and which contemplated a more enlarged revision 
of the Articles of Confederation, and they urgently 
recommended that a second convention of delegates 
to which all the States should be invited to appoint 
Commissioners, should be held at Philadelphia, on the 
second Monday of the next May, for a general revisal 
of the Constitution of the Federal Government, to 
render it adequate to the exigencies of the Union, and 
to report to Congress an act, which, when agreed to 
by them and confirmed by all the State Legislatures, 
should effectually provide for the same. In this re- 
port, first occurred the use of the terms Constitution 
of the Federal Government as applied to the United 
States — and the sentiment was avowed that it should 



23 

be made adequate to the exigencies of the Union. 
There was, however, yet no proposal for recurring to 
the great body of the people. 

The recommendation of the report was repeated 
by Congress without direct reference to it, upon a 
resolution offered by the delegation of Massachusetts, 
founded upon a proviso in the Articles of Confedera- 
tion and upon instructions from the State of New 
York to their delegates in Congress, and upon the 
susrjrestion of several States. The Convention as- 

Do 

sembled accordingly at Philadelphia, on the 9th of 
May, 1787. 

In most of the inspirations of genius, there is a 
simplicity, which, when they are familiarized to the 
general understanding of men by their effects, de- 
tracts from the opinion of their greatness. That the 
people of the British Colonies, who, by their united 
counsels and energies had achieved their indepen- 
dence, should continue to be one people, and consti- 
tute a nation under the form of one organized gov- 
ernment, was an idea, in itself so simple, and ad- 
dressed itself at once so forcibly to the reason, to the 
imagination, and to the benevolent feelings of all, 
that it can scarcely be supposed to have escaped the 
mind of any reflecting man from Maine to Georgia. 
It was the dictate of nature. But no sooner was it 
conceived than it was met by obstacles innumerable 
and insuperable to the general mass of mankind. 
They resulted from the existing social institutions, 
diversified among the parties to the projected national 
union, and seeming to render it impracticable. There 
were chartered rights for the maintenance of which 
the war of the revolution itself had first been waged. 
There were State Sovereignties, corporate feudal 



24 

baronies, tenacious of their own liberty, impatient of 
a superior and jealous, and disdainful of a paramount 
Sovereign, even in the whole democracy of the na- 
tion. There were collisions of boundary and of pro- 
prietary right westward in the soil — southward, in its 
cultivator. In fine the diversities of interests, of 
opinions, of manners, of habits, and even of extrac- 
tion were so great, that the plan of constituting them 
one People, appears not even to have occurred to any 
of the members of the Convention before they were 
assembled together. 

It was earnestly contested in the Convention itself. 
A large proportion of the members adhered to the 
principle of merely revising the articles of the Confed- 
eration and of vesting the powers of Government in 
the confederate Congress. A proposition to that ef- 
fect was made by Mr. Patterson of New Jersey, in a 
series of Resolutions, offered as a substitute for those 
of Mr. Randolph immediately after the first discus- 
sions upon them. 

Nearly four months of anxious deliberation were em- 
ployed by an assembly composed of the men who had 
been the most distinguished for their services civil and 
military, in conducting the country through the ardu- 
ous struggles of the revolution — of men who to the 
fire of genius added all the lights of experience and 
were stimulated by the impulses at once of ardent pat- 
riotism and of individual ambition aspiring to that last 
and most arduous labor of constituting a nation des- 
tined in after times to present a model of Government 
for all the civilized nations of the earth. On the 17th 
of September 1787, they reported. 

When the substance of their work was gone through 
a Committee of five members of whom Mr. Madison 



25 

was one, was appointed to revise the style, and to 
arrange the Articles which had been agreed to by the 
Convention, and this Committee was afterwards char- 
ged with the preparation of an address to the People 
of the United States. 

The address to the People was reported in the form 
of a Letter from Washington the President of the 
Convention to the President of Congress ; a Letter, 
admirable for the brevity and the force with which it 
presents the concentrated argument for the great 
change of their condition, which they called upon their 
fellow citizens to sanction. And this Letter, together 
with an addition of two or three lines in the pream- 
ble, reported by the same Committee, did indeed com- 
prise the most powerful appeal that could sway the 
heart of man, ever exhibited to the contemplation and 
to the hopes of the human race. 

It did not escape the notice or the animadversion 
of the adversaries to this new national organization. 
They were at the time when the Constitution was 
promulgated, perhaps more numerous, and scarcely 
less respectable, than the adherents to the Constitu- 
tion themselves. They had also in the management 
of the discussion, almost all the popular side of the 
argument. 

Government in the first and most obvious aspect 
which it assumes, is a restraint upon human action, 
and as such a restraint upon Liberty. The Constitu- 
tion of the United States Avas intended to be a gov- 
ernment of great energy, and of course of extensive 
restriction not only upon individual Liberty but upon 
the corporate action of States claiming to be Sovereign 
and Independent. The Convention had been aware 
that such restraints upon the People, could be imposed 



26 

by no earthly power other than the People themselves. 
They were aware that to induce the People to im- 
pose upon themselves such binding ligaments, motives 
not less cogent than those, which form the basis of 
human association were indispensably necessary. 
That the first principles of politics must be indisso- 
lubly linked with the first principles of morals. They 
assumed therefore the existence of a People of the 
United States, and made them declare the Consti- 
tution to be their own work — speaking in the first 
person and saying We the People of the United States, 
do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Uni- 
ted States of America — and then the allegation of 
motives — to form a more perfect union, to establish 
justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the 
common defence, promote the general welfare, and se- 
cure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our pos- 
terity. These are precisely the purposes for which 
it has pleased the author of nature to make man a so- 
cial being, and has blended into one his happiness 
with that of his kind. 

So cogent were these motives and so forcibly were 
they compressed within the compass of this preamble, 
and in the Letter from President Washington to the 
President of Congress, that this body immediately and 
unanimously adopted the resolutions of the Conven- 
tion, recommending that the projected Constitution 
should be transmitted to the Legislatures of the sev- 
eral States, to be by them submitted to Conventions 
of Delegates, to be chosen in each State by the Peo- 
ple thereof, under the recommendation of its Legisla- 
ture, for their assent and ratification. This unanim- 
ity of Congress is perhaps the strongest evidence 
ever manifested of the utter contempt into which the 



27 

Articles of Confederation had fallen. The Congress 
w hich gave its unanimous sanction to the measure was 
itself to be annihilated by the Constitution thus propos- 
ed. The Articles of Confederation were to be annihi- 
lated wiih it. Yet all the members of the Congress 
so ready to sanction its dissolution, had been elected 
by virtue of those Articles of Confederation — to them 
the faith of all the States had been pledged, and they 
had expressly prescribed that no alteration of them 
should be adopted, but by the unanimous consent of 
the States. 

Thus far the proposal first made by Mr. Madison 
in the Legislature of Virginia, for the new political or- 
ganization of the Union, had been completely success- 
ful. A People of the United States was formed. A 
Government, Legislative, Executive and Judicial was 
prepared for them, and by a daring though unavoida- 
ble anticipation, had been declared by its authors to 
be the Ordinance of that people themselves. It could 
be made so only by their adoption. But the greatest 
labor still remained to be performed. The people 
throughout the Union were suffering, but a vast pro- 
portion of them were unaware of the cause of the evil 
that was preying upon their vitals. A still greater 
number were bewildered in darkness in search of a 
remedy, and there were not wanting those among the 
most ardent and zealous votaries of Freedom, who in- 
stead of adding to the powers of the general Con- 
gress, inefficient and imbecile as they were, inclined 
rather to redeem the confederacy from the forlorn con- 
dition to which it was reduced by stripping the Con- 
gress of the pittance of power which they possessed. 
In the indulgence of this spirit the Delegates from our 
own Commonwealth of Massachusetts, by express in- 
4 



28- 

structions from their constituents moved a Resolution 
that the election and acceptance of any person as a 
member of Congress should forever thereafter be 
deemed to disqualify such person from being elected 
by Congress to any office of trust or profit under the 
United States for the term for which he should have 
been elected a member of that body. 

This morbid terror of patronage, this patriotic anx- 
iety lest corruption should creep in by appointments 
of members of Congress to office under the authorities 
of the Union, has often been reproduced down even 
to recent days under the present Government of the 
Union. Upon the theories or the practice of the 
present age, it is not the time or the place here to 
comment. But we cannot forbear to remark upon the 
solicitude of our venerable forefathers in this Com- 
monwealth, to remedy the imperfection of the Arti- 
cles of Confederation, the abuses of power, by the 
Congress of that day, and the avenues to corruption 
by the appointment of their members to office, when 
we consider that under the exclusions thus proposed, 
Washington could never have commanded the armies 
of the United States : That neither Franklin, John 
Adams, Arthur Lee, John Jay, Henry Laurens, Thom- 
as Jefferson, Robert Morris, nor Robert R. Living- 
ston could have served them as Ministers abroad, or 
in any ministerial capacity at home — and when we 
reflect that two public Ministers in Europe with their 
Secretaries, one Secretary of Foreign Affairs, one 
Secretary of War and three Commissioners of an emp- 
ty Treasury, constituted the whole list of lucrative of- 
fices civil and military which they had to bestow. 

This incident may serve as an illustration of the 
difficulties which were yet to be encountered before 



29 

the People of the United States could be prevailed 
upon to fix their seal of approbation upon a constitu- 
tion issued in their name, and which granted to a cen- 
tral Government destined to rule over them all, powers 
of energy surpassing those of the most absolute mon- 
archy, and forming in the declared opinion of Jeffer- 
son, the strongest Government in the world. 

In a people inhabiting so great an extent of Terri- 
tory, the difficulties to be surmounted before they could 
be persuaded to adopt this Constitution, were aggra- 
vated both by their dissensions and by their agree- 
ments — by the diversity of their interests and the 
community of their principles. The collision of in- 
terests strongly tended to alienate them from one an- 
other, and all were alike imbued with a deep aversion 
to any unnecessary grant of power. The Constitu- 
tion was no sooner promulgated, than it was assailed 
in the public journals from all quarters of the Union. 
The Convention was boldly and not unjustly charg- 
ed with having transcended their powers, and the 
Congress of the Confederation, were censured in no 
measured terms for having even referred it to the 
State Legislatures, to be submitted to the considera- 
tion of Conventions of the People. 

The Congress of the Confederation were in session 
at New York. Several of its members had been at 
the same time members of the Convention at Phila- 
delphia — and among them were James Madison and 
Alexander Hamilton. John Jay was not then a 
member of Congress nor had he been a member of the 
Convention — but he was the Secretary of Congress 
for foreign affairs and had held that office, from the 
time of his return from Europe, immediately after 
the conclusion of the definitive Treaty of Peace. He 



30 

had therefore felt in its most painful form the imbe- 
cility of the Confederacy of which he was the minis- 
ter, equally incapable of contracting engagements with 
foreign powers with the consciousness of the power to 
fulfil them, or of energy to hold foreign nations to the 
responsibility of performing the engagements contract- 
ed on their part with the United States. New York 
then the central point of the confederacy was the spot 
whence the most effective impression could be made 
by cool dispassionate argument on the public mind ; 
and in the midst of the tempest of excitement through- 
out the country occasioned by the sudden and unex- 
pected promulgation of a system so totally different 
from that of the Confederation, these three persons 
undertook in concert, by a series of popular Essays 
published in the daily journals of the time, to review 
the system of the confederation, to demonstrate its in- 
aptitude not only to all the functions of Government, 
but even to the preservation of the Union, and the ne- 
cessity of an establishment at least as energetic as the 
proposed Constitution to the very existence of the 
United States as a Nation. 

The papers under the signature of Publius were 
addressed to the People of the State of New York, 
and the introductory Essay written by Hamilton, de- 
clared the purpose to discuss all the topics of interest 
connected with the adoption of the Constitution. The 
utility of the Union to the prosperity of the People : 
The insufficiency of the Confederation to preserve that 
Union : The necessity of an energetic Government : 
The conformity of the proposed Constitution to the 
true principles of a republican Government : Its an- 
alogy to the Constitution of the State of New- York, 
and the additional security which its adoption would 



31 

afford to the preservation of republican Government, 
to liberty and to property. The fulfilment of this pur- 
pose was accomplished in eighty six numbers frequent- 
ly since republished, and now constituting a classical 
work in the English language, and a commentary up- 
on the Constitution of the United States, of scarcely 
less authority than the Constitution itself. Written 
in separate numbers, and in very unequal proportions, 
it has not indeed that entire unity of design, or exe- 
cution which might have been expected had it been 
the production of a single mind. Nearly two thirds 
of the papers were written by Mr. Hamilton. Nearly 
one third by Mr. Madison and five numbers only by 
Mr. Jay. 

In the distribution of the several subjects embraced 
in the plan of the work, the inducements to adopt the 
Constitution arising from the relations of the Union 
with foreign nations, were presented by Mr Jay ; the 
defects of the Confederation in this respect were so 
obvious and the evil consequences flowing from them 
were so deeply and universally felt, that the task was 
of comparative ease, and brevity, with that of the 
other two contributors. The defects of the Confed- 
eration were indeed a copious theme for them all ; 
and in the analysis of them, for the exposition of their 
bearing on the Legislation of the several States the 
two principal writers treated the subject so as to in- 
terlace with each other. The 18th, 19th and 20th 
numbers are the joint composition of both. In exam- 
ining closely the points selected by these two great 
co-operators to a common cause, and their course of 
argument for its support, it is not difficult to perceive 
that diversity of genius and of character which after- 
wards separated them so widely from each other on 



32 

questions of political interest, affecting the construc- 
tion of the Constitution which they so ably defended, 
and so strenuously urged their countrymen to adopt. 
The ninth and tenth numbers are devoted to the con- 
sideration of the utility of the Union as a safeguard 
against domestic faction and insurrection. They are 
rival dissertations upon Faction and its remedy. The 
propensity of all free governments to the convulsions 
of faction is admitted by both. The advantages of 
a confederated republic of extensive dimensions to 
control this admitted and unavoidable evil, are insist- 
ed on with equal energy in both — but the ninth num- 
ber written by Hamilton, draws its principal illustra- 
tions from the history of the Grecian Republics ; while 
the tenth written by Madison, searches for the disease 
and for its remedies in the nature and the faculties of 
Man. There is in each of these numbers a disquisi- 
tion of critical and somewhat metaphysical refinement. 
That of Hamilton, upon a distinction, which he pro- 
nounces more subtle than accurate between a confed- 
eracy and consolidation of the States. That of Madi- 
son upon the difference between a Democracy and a 
Republic, as differently affected by Faction, meaning 
by a Democracy, a Government administered by the 
People themselves, and by a Republic, a Government 
by elective representation. These distinctions in both 
cases have, in our experience of the administration of 
the general Government, assumed occasional impor- 
tance, and formed the elements of warm and obstinate 
party collisions. 

The fourteenth number of the Federalist, the next 
in the series written by Mr. Madison, is an elaborate 
answer to an objection which had been urged against 
the Constitution, drawn from the extent of country, 



33 

then comprised within the United States. From the 
deep anxiety pervading the whole of this paper, and a 
most eloquent and pathetic appeal to the spirit of 
union, with which it concludes, it is apparent that the 
objection itself was in the mind of the writer, of the 
most formidable and most plausible character. He en- 
counters it with all the acuteness of his intellect and all 
the energy of his heart. His chief argument is a re- 
currence to his previous distinction between a Republic 
and a Democracy — and next to that by an accurate 
definition of the boundaries within which the United 
States were then comprised. The range between 
the 31st and 45th degree of North Latitude, the At- 
lantic and the Mississippi — he contends that such an 
extent of territory, with the great improvements which 
were to be expected in the facilities of communication 
between its remotest extremes, was not incompatible 
with the existence of a confederated republic — or at 
least that from the vital interest of the people of the 
Union, and of the Liberties of mankind in the success 
of the American Revolution, it was worthy of an ex- 
periment yet untried in the annals of the world. 

The question to what extent of territory a confed- 
erate Republic, under one general government may 
be adopted, without breaking into fragments by its 
own weight, or settling into a monarchy, subversive 
of the liberties of the people, is yet of transcendent 
interest, and of fearful portent to the people of the 
Union. The Constitution of the United States was 
formed for a people inhabiting a territory confined to 
narrow bounds, compared with those which can 
scarcely be said to confine them now. The acquisi- 
tion of Louisiana and of Florida have more than 
doubled our domain; and our settlements and our 



34 

treaties have already removed our Western bounda- 
ries from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean. A 
colonial establishment of immense extent still hangs 
upon our Northern borders, and another confederate 
Republic, seems to offer the most alluring spoils, to 
our ambition and avarice at the South. The idea of 
embracing in one confederated government the whole 
continent of North America, has, at this day, nothing 
chimerical in its conception, and long before a lapse 
of time equal to that which has past since the 14th 
number of the Federalist was written, may require 
the invincible spirit and the uncompromising energy 
of our revolutionary struggle for its solution. 

The other papers of the Federalist, written by 
Mr. Madison, are from the 37th to the 58th number 
inclusive. They relate to the difficulties which the 
Convention had experienced in the formation of a 
proper plan. To its conformity with Republican 
principles, with an apologetic defence of the body for 
transcending their powers. To a general view of the 
powers vested by the plan in the general government, 
and a comparative estimate of the reciprocal influ- 
ence of the general and of the State governments with 
each other. They contain a laborious investigation 
of the maxim which requires a separation of the de- 
partments of power, and a discussion of the means 
for giving to it practical efficacy — and they close with 
an examination critical and philosophical of the or- 
ganization of the House of Representatives in the 
Constitution of the United States — with reference 
to the qualifications of the electors and elected — to 
the term of service of the members ; to the ratio of 
representation; to the total number of the body; and 
to the expected subsequent augmentation of the mem- 



35 

bers— and here he met and refuted an objection to 
the plan founded upon its supposed tendency to ele- 
vate the few above the many. These were the 
topics discussed by James Madison, and in leaving 
to his illustrious associate the devclopcment of the 
other Departments of the Senate, of the Executive, 
of the Judiciary, and the bearing of the whole sys- 
tems upon the militia, the commerce and revenues, 
the military and naval establishments, and to the 
public economy, it was doubtless because both from 
inclination and principle he preferred the considera- 
tion of those parts of the instrument which bore upon 
popular right, and the freedom of the citizens to that 
of the aristocratic and monarchical elements of the 
whole fabrick. 

The papers of the Federalist had a powerful, but 
limited influence upon the public mind. The Con- 
stitution was successively submitted to Conventions 
of the People, in each of the thirteen States, and in 
almost every one of them was debated against oppo- 
sitions of deep feeling, and strong party excitement. 
The authors of the Federalist were again called to 
buckle on their armour in defence of their plan. 
The Convention for the Commonwealth of Virginia, 
met in June, 1788, nine months after the Constitution 
had been promulgated. It had already been ratified 
by seven of the States, and New Hampshire, at an 
adjourned session of her Convention, adopted it while 
the Convention of Virginia were in session. The 
assent of that State was therefore to complete the 
number of nine, which the Constitution itself had 
provided should be sufficient for undertaking its ex- 
ecution between the ratifying States. A deeper in- 
terest was then involved in the decision of Virginia, 
5 



36 

than in that of any other member of the Confeder- 
acy, and in no State had the opposition to the plan 
been so deep, so extensive, so formidable as there. 
Two of her citizens, second only to Washington, by 
the weight of their characters, the splendor of their 
public services and the reputation of their genius and 
talents, Patrick Henry, the first herald of the Revo- 
lution in the South, as James Otis had been at the 
North, and Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Dec- 
laration of Independence, and the most intimate and 
confidential friend of Madison himself, disapproved 
the Constitution. Jefferson was indeed at that time 
absent from the State and the country, as the repre- 
sentative of the United States at the Court of France. 
His objections to the Constitution were less fervent 
and radical. Patrick Henry's opposition was to the 
whole plan, and to its fundamental principle the 
change from a confederation of Independent States, 
to a complicated government, partly federal, and 
partly national. He was a member of the Virginia 
Convention ; and there it was that Mr. Madison was 
destined to meet and encounter, and overcome the all 
but irresistible power of his eloquence, and the inex- 
haustible resources of his gigantic mind. 

The debates in the Virginia Convention furnish an 
exposition of the principles of the Constitution, and 
a Commentary upon its provisions not inferior to the 
papers of the Federalist. Patrick Henry pursued his 
hostility to the system into all its details ; objecting not 
only to the Preamble and the first Article, but to the 
Senate, to the President, to the Judicial Power, to 
the treaty making power, to the controul given to 
Congress over the militia, and especially to the omis- 
sion of a Bill of Rights — seconded and sustained 



37 

with great ability by George Mason, who had been a 
member of the Convention which formed the Con- 
stitution, by James Monroe and William Grayson, 
there was not a controvertible point, real or imagi- 
nary in the whole instrument which escaped their 
embittered opposition ; while upon every point Mr. 
Madison was prepared to meet them, with cogent 
argument, with intense and anxious feeling, and with 
mild, conciliatory gentleness of temper, disarming the 
adversary by the very act of seeming to decline con- 
tention with him. Mr. Madison devoted himself 
particularly to the task of answering and replying to 
the objections of Patrick Henry, following him step 
by step, and meeting him at every turn. His prin- 
cipal co-adjutors were Governor Randolph, Edmund 
Pendleton, the President of the Convention, John 
Marshall, George Nicholas, and Henry Lee of West- 
moreland. Never was there assembled in Virginia a 
body of men, of more surpassing talent, of bolder 
energy, or of purer integrity than in that Convention. 
The volume of their debates should be the pocket 
and the pillow companion of every youthful American 
aspiring to the honor of rendering important service 
to his country ; and there as he reads and meditates, 
will he not fail to perceive the steady, unfaltering 
mind of James Madison, marching from victory to 
victory, over the dazzling but then beclouded genius 
and eloquence of Patrick Henry. 

The result was the unconditional ratification by a 
majority of only eight votes, of the Constitution of the 
United States on the part of the Commonwealth of 
Virginia, together with resolutions, recommending 
sundry amendments to supply the omission of a Bill of 
Rights. The example for this had been first set by 



38 

the Convention of Massachusetts, at the motion of 
John Hancock, and it was followed by several other 
of the State Conventions, and gave occasion to the 
first ten Articles, amendatory of the Constitution pre- 
pared by the first Congress of the United States and 
ratified by the competent number of the State Legis- 
latures, and which supply the place of a Bill of rights. 

In the organization of the Government of the Uni- 
ted States, Washington the leader of the armies of the 
revolution, the President of the Convention which had 
prepared the Constitution for the acceptance of the 
People — first in War, first in Peace, and first in the 
hearts of his Countrymen, was by their unanimous 
voice called to the first Presidency of the United 
States. For his assistance in the performance of the 
functions of the Executive power, after the Institution 
by Congress of the chief Departments, he selected 
Alexander Hamilton for the office of Secretary of the 
Treasury, and Thomas Jefferson for that of Secretary 
of State. Mr. Madison was elected one of the mem- 
bers of the House of Representatives in the first Con- 
gress of the United States under the Constitution. 

The Treasury itself was to be organized. Public 
credit, prostrated by the impotence of the Confedera- 
tion was to be restored, provision was to be made for 
the punctual payment of the public debt — taxes were 
to be levied — the manufactures, commerce and nav- 
igation of the Country were to be fostered and en- 
couraged ; and a system of conduct towards foreign 
powers was to be adopted and maintained. A Judi- 
ciary system was also to be instituted, accommodated 
to the new and extraordinary character of the general 
Government. A permanent seat of Government was 
to be selected and subjected to the exclusive jurisdic- 



39 

tion of Congress ; and the definite action of each of 
the Departments of the Government was to be settled 
and adjusted. In the councils of President Washing- 
ton, divisions of opinion between Mr. Jefferson and 
Mr. Hamilton soon widened into collisions of principle 
and produced mutual personal estrangement and irri- 
tation. In the formation of a general s\stem of poli- 
cy for the conduct of the Administration in National 
concerns at home and abroad, different views were 
taken by Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Hamilton, winch 
Washington labored much but with little success to 
conciliate. Hamilton, charged by successive calls from 
the House of Representatives, for reports of Plans for 
the restoration of public credit ; upon the protection 
and encouragement of Manufactures, and upon a Na- 
tional Mint and a Bank, transmitted upon each of those 
subjects reports of consummate ability and proposed 
plans most of which were adopted by Congress almost 
without alteration. The Secretary of State during the 
same period made reports to Congress, not less celebra- 
ted, on the Fisheries, on the system of commercial reg- 
ulations most proper to be established, and upon weights 
and measures. Negotiations with foreign powers, 
which the inefficiency of the confederation had left in 
a lamentable and languishing condition, humiliating to 
the national honor and reputation, were resumed and 
reinstituted, and by long and complicated correspon- 
dencies with the Governments of Great Britain, Spain 
and France, the National character was in the first 
term of the administration of Washington redeemed 
and exhibited to the w r orld with a splendor never sur- 
passed and which gave to the tone of our national in- 
tercourse with the Sovereigns of the earth a dignity, 
a firmness, a candor and moderation, which shamed 



40 

the blustering and trickish diplomacy of Europe at that 
day and shed a beam of unfading glory upon the name 
of republican America. But the National Constitu- 
tion had not only operated as if by enchantment a most 
auspicious revolution in the character and reputation 
of the newly independent American People ; it had 
opened new avenues to honor and power and fame, 
and new prospects to individual ambition. 

No sooner was the new Government organized than 
the eyes, the expectations and the interests and pas- 
sions of men turned to the designation of the succes- 
sion to the Presidency, when the official term of Wash- 
ington should be completed. His own intention was 
to retire at the expiration of the first four years allot- 
ted to the service. The candidates of the North and 
the South supported by the geographical sympathies 
of their respective friends were already giving rise to 
the agency of political combinations. The Northern 
candidate was not yet distinctly designated, but be- 
fore the expiration of the first Congress, Mr. Jefferson 
was the only intended candidate of the South. 

The Protection of Manufactures, the restoration of 
public credit, the recovery of the securities of the 
public debt from a state of depreciation little short of 
total debasement, and the facilities of exchange and of 
circulation furnished by the establishment of a Nation- 
al Bank were of far deeper interest to the commercial 
and Atlantic than to the plantation States. Mr. Jef- 
ferson's distrust and jealousy of the powers granted by 
the Constitution followed him into office and were 
perhaps sharpened by the successful exercise of them, 
under the auspices of a rival statesman ; he insisted 
upon a rigid construction of all the grants of power — 
he denied the Constitutional power of Congress to es- 



41 

tablish Corporations and especially a National Bank. 
The question was discussed in the Cabinet Council of 
Washington and written opinions of Mr. Jefferson and 
of Edmund Randolph, then Attorney General against 
the Constitutional power of Congress to establish a 
Bank were given. With these opinions Mr. Madi- 
son then concurred. Other questions of justice and 
expediency connected with the funding system of Mr. 
Hamilton gave rise to warm and acrimonious debates 
in Congress, and mingling with the sectional divisions 
of the Union, and with individual attachments to men, 
gave an impulse and direction to party spirit which 
has continued to this day, and however modified by 
changes of times, of circumstances and of men can 
never be wholly extinguished. Too happy should I 
be, if with a voice speaking from the last to the com- 
ing generation of my country, I could effectively urge 
them to seek in the temper and moderation of James 
Madison that healing balm which assuages the ma- 
lignity of the deepest seated political disease, redeems 
to life the rational mind and restores to health the in- 
corporated union of our country, even from the brain 
fever of party spirit. 

To the sources of dissensions and the conflicts of 
opinion transmitted from the confederation or genera- 
ted by the organization of the new Government were 
soon added the confluent streams of the French revo- 
lution and its complication of European Wars. There 
were features in the French revolution closely resemb- 
ling our own ; there were points of national interest in 
both Countries well adapted to harmonize their rela- 
tions with each other, and a sentiment of gratitude 
rooted in the hearts of the American People by the 
recent remembrance of the benefits derived from the 



42 

alliance with Fiance and community of cause against 
Britain engaged all our sympathies in favor of the Peo- 
ple of France, subverting their own Monarchy ; and 
when her War, first kindled with Austria and Prussia 
spread its flames to Great Britain, the partialities of 
resentment and hatred, deepening the tide and stimu- 
lating the current of more kindly and benevolent affec- 
tions, became so ardent and impetuous that there was 
imminent danger of the country's being immediately 
involved in the War on the side of France — a danger 
greatly aggravated by the guaranty to France of her 
Islands in the West Indies. The subject immediately 
became a cause of deliberation in the Executive Cab- 
inet and discordant opinions again disclosed themselves 
between the Secretary of State and the Secretary of 
the Treasury. 

On the 18th of April, 1793, President Washington 
submitted to his Cabinet thirteen questions with re- 
gard to the measures to be taken by him in conse- 
quence of the revolution which had overthrown the 
French monarchy ; of the new organization of a repub- 
lic in that country ; of the appointment of a minis- 
ter from that republic to the United States, and of the 
war, declared by the National Convention of France 
against Great Britain. The first of these questions 
was whether a proclamation should issue to prevent 
interferences of the citizens of the United States in 
the War ? Whether the proclamation should or should 
not contain a declaration of neutrality ? The second 
was whether a minister from the republic of France 
should be received. Upon these two questions the 
opinion of the Cabinet was unanimous in the affirma- 
tive — that a Proclamation of neutrality should issue — 
and that the minister from the French Republic should 



43 

be received. But upon all the other questions, the 
opinions of the four heads of the Departments were 
equally divided. They were indeed questions of .dif- 
ficulty and delicacy equal to their importance. No less 
than whether altera revolution in France annihilating 
the Government with which the treaties of alliance 
and of commerce had been contracted, the Treaties 
themselves were to be considered binding as between 
the nations ; and particularly whether the stipulation 
of guaranty to France of her possessions in the West 
Indies was binding upon the United States to the ex- 
tent of imposing upon them the obligation of taking 
side with France in the War. As the members of the 
Cabinet disagreed in their opinions upon these ques- 
tions, and as there was no immediate necessity for de- 
ciding them, the further consideration of them was 
postponed and they were never afterwards resumed. 
While these discussions of the Cabinet of Washing- 
ton were held, the Minister Plenipotentiary from the 
French republic arrived in this country. He had been 
appointed by the National Convention of France which 
had dethroned, and tried, and sentenced to death, and 
executed Louis the XVI th, abolished the Monarchy 
and proclaimed a republic one and indivisible under 
the auspices of Liberty, equality and fraternity as 
thenceforth the Government of France. By all the 
rest of Europe they were then considered as revolted 
subjects in rebellion against their Sovereign ; and were 
not recognized as constituting an independent Gov- 
ernment: 

General Hamilton and General Knox were of opin- 
ion that the Minister from France should be condi- 
tionally received, with the reservation of the question, 
whether the United Suites were still bound to fulfil 
6 



44 

the stipulations of the Treaties. They inclined to the 
opinion that the Treaties themselves were annulled 
by the revolution of the Government in France — an 
opinion to which the example of the revolutionary 
Government had given plausibility by declaring some 
of the Treaties made by the abolished Monarchy no 
longer binding upon the nation. Mr. Hamilton thought 
also that France had no just claim to the fulfilment of 
the stipulation of guaranty, because that stipulation and 
the whole treaty of Alliance in which it was contain- 
ed were professedly and on the face of them only de- 
fensive, while the War which the French Convention 
had declared against Great Britain was on the part of 
France offensive, the first declaration having been is- 
sued by her — that the United States were at all events 
absolved from the obligation of the guaranty by their 
inability to perform it, and that under the Constitu- 
tion of the United States the interpretation of Trea- 
ties and the obligations resulting from them, were with- 
in the competency of the Executive Department, at 
least concurrently with the Legislature. It does not 
appear that these opinions were debated or contested 
in the Cabinet. By their unanimous advice the Proc- 
lamation was issued and Edmund Charles Genet was 
received as Minister Plenipotentiary of the French 
Republic. Thus the Executive administration did 
assume and exercise the power of recognising a revo- 
lutionary foreign Government as a legitimate Sove- 
reign with whom the ordinary diplomatic relations 
were to be entertained. But the Proclamation con- 
tained no allusion whatever to the Treaties between 
the United States and France, nor of course to the 
Article of Guaranty or its obligations. 

Whatever doubts may have been entertained by a 



45 

large portion of the people, of the right of the Ex- 
ecutive to acknowledge a new and revolutionary 
government, not recognized by any other Sovereign 
State, or of the sound policy of receiving without wait- 
ing for the sanction of Congress, a minister from a 
republic which had commenced her career by putting 
to death the king whom she had dethroned, and which 
had rushed into war with almost all the rest of Eu- 
rope, no manifestation of such doubts was publicly 
made. A current of popular favor sustained the 
French Revolution, at that stage of its progress, 
which nothing could resist, and far from indulging 
any question of the right of the President to recog- 
nise a new revolutionary government, by receiving 
from it the credentials which none but Sovereigns 
can grant, the American People would, at that mo- 
ment, have scarcely endured an instant of hesitation 
on the part of the President, which should have delay- 
ed for an hour the reception of the minister from the 
Republic of France. But the Proclamation enjoining 
neutrality upon the people of the United States, in- 
directly counteracted the torrent of partiality in favor 
of France, and was immediately assailed with intem- 
perate violence in many of the public journals. The 
right of the Executive to issue any Proclamation of 
neutrality was fiercely and pertinaciously denied, as a 
usurpation of Legislative authority, and in that par 
ticular case it was charged with forestalling and pre- 
maturely deciding the question whether the United 
States were bound by the guaranty to France of her 
West India possessions, in the treaty of alliance to 
take side in the war with her against Great Britain — 
and with deciding it against France. 

Mr. Jefferson had advised the Proclamation ; but 



46 

he had not considered it as deciding the question of 
the guaranty. The government of the French Re- 
public had not claimed and never did claim the per- 
formance of the guaranty. But so strenuously was 
the right of the President to issue the Proclamation 
contested, that Mr. Hamilton the first adviser of the 
measure deemed it necessary to defend it inofficially 
before the public. This he did in seven successive 
papers under the signature of Pacificus. But in de- 
fending the Proclamation, he appears to consider it as 
necessarily involving the decision against the obliga- 
tion of the guaranty and maintains the right of the 
Executive so to decide. Mr. Madison perhaps in 
some degree influenced by the opinions and feelings 
of his long cherished and venerated friend, Jefferson, 
was already harboring suspicions of a formal design 
on the part of Hamilton, and of the federal party 
generally to convert the government of the United 
States into a monarchy like that of Great Britain, and 
thought he perceived in these papers of Pacificus the 
assertion of a prerogative in the President of the 
United States to engage the nation in war. He 
therefore entered the lists against Mr. Hamilton in 
the public journals and in five papers under the sig- 
nature of Helvidius, scrutinized the doctrines of Pa- 
cificus with an acuteness of intellect never perhaps 
surpassed and with a severity scarcely congenial to 
his natural disposition and never on any other occa- 
sion indulged. Mr. Hamilton did not reply ; nor in 
any of his papers did he notice the animadversions of 
Helvidius. But all the Presidents of the United 
States have from that time exercised the right of 
yielding and withholding the recognition of govern- 
ments consequent upon revolutions, 1 hough the exam- 



47 

pie of issuing a Proclamation of neutrality has never 
been repeated. The respective powers of the Presi- 
dent and Congress of the United States, in the case 
of war with foreign powers are yet undetermined. 
Perhaps they can never be defined. The Constitu- 
tion expressly gives to Congress the power of declar- 
ing war and that act can of course never be perform- 
ed by the President alone. But war is often made 
without being declared. War is a state in which 
nations are placed not alone by their own acts, but by 
the acts of other nations. The declaration of war is 
in its nature a legislative act, but the conduct of war 
is and must be executive. However startled we may 
be at the idea that the Executive Chief Magistrate 
has the power of involving the nation in war, even 
without consulting Congress, an experience of fifty 
years has proved that in numberless cases he has and 
must have exercised the power. In the case which 
gave rise to this controversy the recognition of the 
French Republic and the reception of her minister 
might have been regarded by the allied powers as acts 
of hostility to them, and they did actually interdict 
all neutral commerce with France. Defensive war 
must necessarily be among the duties of the Executive 
Chief Magistrate. The papers of Pacificus and Hel- 
vidius are among the most ingenious and profound 
Commentaries on that most important part of the 
Constitution, the distribution of the Legislative and 
Executive powers incident to war, and when consid- 
ered as supplementary to the joint labors of Hamilton 
and Madison in the Federalist, they possess a deep 
and monitory interest to the American philosophical 
Statesman. The Federalist exhibits the joint efforts 
of two powerful minds in promoting one great common 



48 

object, the adoption of the Constitution of the United 
States. The papers of Pacificus and Helvidius pre- 
sent the same minds, in collision with each other, exert- 
ing all their energies in conflict, upon the construction 
of the same instrument which they had so arduously 
labored to establish ; and it is remarkable that upon 
the points in the papers of Pacificus most keenly 
contested by his adversary, the most forcible of his 
arguments are pointed with quotations from the papers 
of the Federalist written by Mr. Hamilton. 

But whether in conjunction with or in opposition to 
each other, the co-operation or the encounter of in- 
tellects thus exalted and refined, controled by that 
moderation and humanity, which have hitherto char- 
acterised the history of our Union, cannot but ulti- 
mately terminate in spreading light and promoting 
peace among men. Happy, thrice happy the people, 
whose political oppositions and conflicts have no ulti- 
mate appeal but to their own reason ; of whose party 
feuds the only conquests are of argument, and whose 
only triumphs are of the mind. In other ages and in 
other regions of our own, the question of the respective 
powers of the Legislature and of the Execuive with 
reference to war, might itself have been debated in 
blood and sent numberless victims to their account on 
the battle-field or the scaffold. So it was in the san- 
guinary annals of the French Revolution. So it has 
been and yet is in the successive revolutions of our 
South American neighbors. May that merciful Being 
who has hitherto overruled all our diversities of opin- 
ion, tempered our antagonizing passions, and con- 
ciliated our conflicting interests, still preside in all our 
councils and in the tempests of our civil commotions, 
still ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm. 



49 

It was indeed at one of the most turbulent and tem- 
pestuous periods of human history that the Constitu- 
tion of the United States first went into operation. 
It was convulsed not only by the convulsions of the 
old world but by tumultuary agitations of the most 
alarming character and tendency from within. Such 
were the dangers and the difficulties with which the 
Government of the United States from the first mo- 
ment of its organization under Washington was beset 
and surrounded, that they undoubtedly led him to the 
determination to withdraw from the charge and res- 
ponsibility of presiding over it, at as early a period as 
possible. It was with difficulty that he was prevail- 
ed upon to postpone the execution of this design till 
the expiration of a second term of service ; but so 
radically different were the opinions and the systems 
ot policy of Washington's two principal advisers, espe- 
cially with reference to the external relations of the 
United States, that he was unable to retain beyond 
the limits of the first term their united assistance in 
his Cabinet. In the struggle to maintain the neutral- 
ity which he had proclaimed, and in the festering in- 
flammation of interests and passions, gathering with 
the progress of the French revolution, he coincided 
more in judgment with the Secretary of the Treasury 
than with the Secretary of State, and they success- 
ively retired from their offices, in which each of them 
had rendered the most important services and contrib- 
uted to raise the Country and its Government high in 
the estimation of the world, but unfortunately without 
being able to harmonise, and finally, even to co-ope- 
rate with each other. 

Mr. Jefferson's retirement was first in order — it 
was voluntary but under circumstances of dissatisfac- 



50 

tion at the prevalence of the Councils of his rival in 
the Cabinet — and under irritated prepossessions of a 
deliberate design, in Hamilton, and of all the leading 
supporters of Washington's administration, to shape 
the Government of the United States into a Mon- 
archy like that of Great Britain. This exasperated 
feeling, nourished by the political controversy then 
blazing in all its fury in the War between France and 
the monarchies of Europe, gradually became the main 
spring of the opposition to Washington's administra- 
tion ; an opposition which from that time looked to 
Jefferson as their leader, and head. This opposition, 
fomented by the unprincipled injustice of both the bel- 
ligerent European powers, and especially by the aban- 
doned profligacy of the directorial Government of 
France, continued and increased until in the last year 
of Washington's administration, a majority if not of 
the People of the United States, at least of their rep- 
resentatives in Congress, were associated with it. Of 
that opposition, Mr. Jefferson was the favored candi- 
date for the succession to the Presidency, and by the 
result of a severely contested election, was placed in 
the chair of the Senate as Vice President of the Uni- 
ted States. This was the effect of a provision in the 
Constitution, which has since been altered by an 
Amendment. It was one of the new experiments in 
Government, attempted by the Constitution, and had 
then been received with an unusual degree of favor, 
l>\ an anticipated expectation that its operation would 
be to mitigate and conciliate party spirit, by causing 
two persons to be voted for, to fill the same office, of 
President, and by consoling the unsuccessful candidate 
;iik1 his friends with the second office in the Govern- 
ment of the Union. The test of experience soon dis- 



51 

abused the fallacious foresight of a benevolent theory, 
and disclosed springs of human action adverse to the 
device of placing either a political antagonist or co- 
adjutor of the Chief Magistrate at the head of the 
Senate, and as contingently his successor. 

The principles of the administration of Washington 
were pursued by his immediate successor. The op- 
position to them was encouraged and fortified by the 
position of their leader in the second seat of power ; 
and the Directory of France wallowing in corruption 
and venality, was preparing the way, for their own 
destruction at home, and setting up to sale the Peace 
of their Country with other nations and especially 
with the United States. By their violence and fraud 
they compelled the Congress to annul the existing 
Treaties between the 4 United States and France ; and 
without an absolute declaration of War to authorize 
defensive hostilities. 

In the controversy with France during this period, 
the executive administration was sustained by a vast 
majority of the People of the Union and the elections 
both of the People and of the State Legislatures re- 
turned decided majorities in both houses of Congress 
of corresponding opinions and policy. A powerful and 
inveterate opposition to all the measures both of Con- 
gress and of the administration was however con- 
stantly maintained with the countenance and co-op- 
eration of Mr. Jefferson, whose partialities in favor of 
France and the French revolution, though not extend- 
ing to the justification of the secret intrigues and 
open hostilities of the Directory still counteracted the 
operations of the American Government to resist and 
defeat them. 

The violence and pertinacity of the opposition pro- 
7 



52 

voked the ruling majority in Congress to the adoption 
of two measures which neither the exasperated spirit 
of the times, nor the deliberate judgment of after days 
could reconcile to the temper of the people. I allude 
to the two acts of Congress since generally known by 
the names of the Alien and Sedition Laws. Of their 
merits or demerits this is not the time or the place to 
speak. They passed in Congress without vehement 
opposition ; for Mr. Jefferson then holding the office 
of Vice President of the United States, took no acting 
part against them as the presiding officer of the Sen- 
ate, and Mr. Madison at the close of the administra- 
tion of Washington, had relinquished his seat in the 
House of Representatives of the Union. Devoted in 
friendship to the person and in policy to the views 
of Mr. Jefferson, he participated with deference in 
his opinions to an extent which the deliberate convic- 
tions of his own judgment sometimes failed to con- 
firm. The alien and sedition acts were intended to 
suppress the intrigues of foreign emissaries, employed 
by the profligate Government of the French Directory, 
and who abused the freedom of the press by traducing 
the characters of the administration and its friends, 
and by instigating the resistance of the people against 
the Government and the laws of the Union. 

Among the eminent qualities of Mr. Jefferson, was 
a keen, constant, and profound faculty of observation 
with regard to the action and re-action of the popu- 
lar opinion upon the measures of government. He 
perceived immediately the operation of the alien and 
sedition Acts, and he availed himself of them with 
equal sagacity and ardor for the furtherance of his 
own views of public policy and of personal advance- 
ment. In opposition to the alien and sedition Acts, 



53 

he deemed it advisable to bring into action so far as 
was practicable, the power of the State Legislatures 
against the government of the Union. In the pur- 
suit of this system it was his good fortune to obtain 
the aid and co-operation of Mr. Madison and of 
other friends equally devoted personally to him, and 
concurring more fully in his sentiments, then members 
of the Legislature of Kentucky. Assuming as first 
principles that by the Constitution of the United 
States, Congress possessed no authority to restrain 
in any manner the freedom of the press, not even in 
self-defence against the most incendiary defamation, 
and that the principles of the English Common Law 
were of no force under the Government of the United 
States, he drafted, with his own hand, resolutions 
which were adopted by the Legislature of Kentucky 
declaring that each State had the right to judge for 
itself as well of infractions of the common Constitu- 
tion by the general government, as of the mode and 
measure of redress — that the alien and sedition Laws 
were, in their opinion, manifest and palpable viola- 
tions of the Constitution and therefore null and void ; 
and that a nullification by the State Sovereignties of 
all unauthorized acts done under color of the Consti- 
tution is the rightful remedy for such infractions. 

The principles thus assumed, and particularly that 
of remedial nullification by State authority, have been 
more than once re-asserted by parties predominating 
in one or more of the confederated States, dissatisfied 
with particular acts of the general government. 
They have twice brought the Union itself to the 
verge of dissolution. To that result it must come, 
should it ever be the misfortune of the American 
People that they should obtain the support of a suf- 



54 

ficient portion of them to make them effective by 
force. They never have yet been so supported. 
The alien and sedition Acts were temporary Statutes 
and expired by their own limitations. No attempt 
has been made to revive them, but in our most recent 
times, restrictions far more rigorous upon the freedom 
of the press, of speech and of personal liberty, than 
the alien and sedition Laws, have not only been 
deemed within the constitutional power of Congress, 
but even recommended by the Chief Magistrate of 
the Union, to encounter the dangers and evils of in- 
cendiary publications. 

The influence of Mr. Jefferson over the mind of 
Mr. Madison, was composed of all that genius, talent, 
experience, splendid public services, exalted reputa- 
tion, added to congenial tempers, undivided friend- 
ship and habitual sympathies of interest and of feeling 
could inspire. Among the numerous blessings which 
it was the rare good fortune of Mr. Jefferson's life to 
enjoy, was that of the uninterrupted, disinterested, 
and efficient friendship of Madison. But it was the 
friendship of a mind not inferior in capacity and tem- 
pered with a calmer sensibility and a cooler judgment 
than his own. With regard to the measures of 
Washington's administration, from the time when the 
Councils of Hamilton acquired the ascendancy over 
those of Jefferson, the opinions of Mr. Madison gen- 
erally coincided with those of his friend. He had 
resisted, on Constitutional grounds, the establishment 
of a National Bank — he had proposed, and with all 
his ability had urged important modifications of the 
funding system. He had written and published the 
papers of Helvidius, and he had originated measures 
of commercial regulation against Great Britain, in- 



55 

stead of which Washington had preferred to institute 
the pacific and friendly mission of Mr. Jay. He had 
disapproved of the treaty concluded by that eminent, 
profound and incorruptible statesman, a measure the 
most rancorously contested of any 'of those of Wash- 
ington's administration, and upon which public opin- 
ion has remained divided to this day. Mr. Madison 
concurred entirely with Mr. Jefferson in the policy of 
neutrality to the European Wars, but with a strong 
leaning of favor to France and her revolution which it 
was then impossible to hold without a leaning ap- 
proaching to hostility against Great Britain, her pol- 
icy and her Government. Mr. Madison therefore at 
the earnest solicitation of Mr. Jefferson introduced 
into the Legislature of Virginia the resolutions adop- 
ted on the 21st of December 1798, declaring 1, That 
the Constitution of the United States was a compact, 
to which the States were parties granting limited 
powers of Government. 2. That in case of a deliber- 
ate, palpable and dangerous exercise of other powers, 
not granted by the compact, the States had the right 
to and were in duty bound to interpose, for arresting 
the progress of the evils and for maintaining within 
their respective limits, the authorities rights and liber- 
ties appertaining to them. 3. That the alien and sedi- 
tion acts were palpable and alarming infractions of 
the Constitution. 4. That the State of Virginia hav- 
ing by its Convention which ratified the federal Con- 
stitution expressly declared that among other essen- 
tial rights the liberty of conscience and the press can- 
not be cancelled, abridged, restrained, or modified by 
any authority of the United States, and from its ex- 
treme anxiety to guard these rights from every possi- 
ble attack of sophistry and ambition, having with the 



56 

other States recommended an amendment for that 
purpose, which amendment was in due time annexed 
to the Constitution, it would mark a reproachful 
inconsistency and criminal degeneracy if an indiffer- 
ence were now shown to the most palpable violation 
of one of the rights thus declared and secured ; and 
to the establishment of a precedent which might be 
fatal to the other. 5. That the State of Virginia 
declared the alien and sedition laws unconstitu- 
tional — solemnly appealed to the like dispositions in 
the other States, in confidence that they would con- 
cur with her in that declaration, and that the neces- 
sary and proper measures would be taken by each, for 
co-operating with her, in maintaining unimpaired the 
authorities, rights and liberties reserved to the States, 
respectively or to the People. 6. That the Govern- 
or should be desired to transmit a copy of these res- 
olutions to the Executive authority of each of the 
other States, with a request that they should be com- 
municated to the respective State Legislatures, and 
that a copy should be furnished to each of the Sena- 
tors and Representatives of Virginia in Congress. 

The resolutions did but in part carry into effect the 
principles and purposes of Mr. Jefferson. His origi- 
nal intention was that the alien and sedition acts 
should be declared by the State Legislatures, null and 
void — and that with the declaration that nullification 
by them was the rightful remedy for such usurpations 
of power by the federal Government, committees of 
correspondence and co-operation should be appointed 
by the Legislatures of the States concurring in the 
resolutions, for consultation with regard to further 
measures. Before the adoption of the Virginia reso- 
lutions, the Legislature of Kentucky had adopted 



57 

i 

others drafted by Mr. Jefferson himself and intro- 
duced by two of his friends in that body. In those 
resolutions the doctrines of nullification by the State 
Legislatures of acts of Congress, deemed by them un- 
constitutional, was first explicitly and unequivocally 
asserted. But even in Kentucky the Legislature was 
not quite prepared for consultation upon further meas- 
ures of co-operation by committees of correspondence. 

The Virginia Resolutions were transmitted to the 
other States with an address to the people in support 
of them, written by Mr. Madison. They were 
strongly disapproved by resolutions of all the Legisla- 
tures of the New England States and by those of New 
York and Delaware. They were not nor were those 
of the Legislature of Kentucky concurred in by any 
other State Legislature of the Union, but they con- 
tributed greatly to increase the unpopularity of the 
measures which they denounced and sharpened the 
edge of every weapon, wielded against the adminis- 
tion of the time. 

At the succeeding sessions of the Legislatures of 
Kentucky and of Virginia, they took into considera- 
tion the answers of the Legislatures of the other States 
to their resolutions of 1798. The reply of Kentucky 
was in the form of a resolution re-asserting the right 
of the separate States to judge of infractions, by the 
Government of the union, of the Constitution of the 
United States, and expressly affirming that a nulli- 
fication by the State Sovereignties of all unauthor- 
ized acts done under color of that instrument was the 
rightful remedy ; and complaining of the doctrines 
and principles attempted to be maintained in all the 
answers, that of Virginia only excepted. 

In the Legislature of Virginia, a long, most able and 



58 

elaborate report was written by Mr. Madison, in re- 
ply to the answers received from the other States, 
and concluded with the following resolution : 

" That the General Assembly, having carefully and 
respectfully attended to the proceedings of a number 
of the States, in answer to the resolutions of Decem- 
ber 21, 1798, and having accurately and fully re-ex- 
amined and re-considered the latter, find it to be their 
indispensable duty to adhere to the same as founded in 
truth, as consonant with the Constitution and as con- 
ducive to its preservation ; and more especially to be 
their duty to renew as they do hereby renew their 
protest against the alien and sedition acts, as palpable 
and alarming infractions of the Constitution." 

The report and resolution were adopted by the 
Legislature in February, 1 800. The alien law expired 
by its own limitation on the 25th of June of that year, 
and the sedition act on the 4th of March, 1801. 

The proceedings of the Legislatures of Kentucky 
and Virginia relating to the alien and sedition acts, 
gave to them an importance far beyond that which 
naturally belonged to them. The acts themselves and 
the resolutions of the Legislatures concerning them 
may now be considered merely as adversary party 
measures. 

The agency of Mr. Jefferson in originating the 
measures of both the State Legislatures was at the 
time profoundly secret. It has been made known 
only since his decease, but in estimating the weight 
of the objections against the two laws on sound prin- 
ciples as well of morals as of politics, the fact as well 
as the manner of that agency are observable. The 
situation which he then held, and that to which he 
ascended by its operation, are considerations not to be 



59 

overlooked in fixing the deliberate judgment of pos- 
terity upon the whole transaction. Mr. Madison's 
motives lor the part which he acted in the drama, are 
not liable to the same scrutiny ; nor did his public 
station at the time, nor the principles which he assert- 
ed in the management of the controversy, nor the 
measures which he proposed, recommended and 
accomplished subject his posthumous reputation and 
character to the same animadversions. Standing here 
as the sincere and faithful organ of the sentiments of 
my fellow citizens to honor a great and illustrious 
benefactor of his Country it would be as foreign from 
the honest and deliberate judgment of my soul as from 
the sense of my duties on this occasion to profess my 
assent to the reasoning of his report, or my acquies- 
cence in the application of its unquestionable princi- 
ples to the two acts of Congressional legislation which 
it arraigns. That because the States of this Union as 
well as their people, are parties to the Constitutional 
compact of the federal Government, therefore the 
State Legislatures have the right to judge of 
infractions of the Constitution by the organized Gov- 
ernment of the whole and to declare acts of Congress 
unconstitutional is as abhorrent to the conclusions of 
my judgment as to the feelings of my heart — but 
holding the converse of those propositions with a con- 
viction as firm as an article of religious faith, I too 
clearly see to admit of denial, that minds of the 
highest order of intellect, and hearts of the purest 
integrity of purpose have been brought to different 
conclusions. If Jefferson and Madison deemed the 
alien and sedition acts, plain and palpable infractions 
of the Constitution, Washington and Patrick Henry 
held them to be good and wholesome laws. These 
8 



60 

opinions were perhaps all formed under excitements 
and prepossessions which detract from the weight of 
the highest authority. The alien act was passed un- 
der feelings of honest indignation at the audacity with 
which foreign emissaries were practising within the 
bosom of the country upon the passions of the people 
against their own Government. The sedition act was 
intended as a curb upon the publication of malicious 
and incendiary slander, upon the President or the two 
Houses of Congress or either of them. But they 
were restrictive upon the personal liberty of foreign 
emissaries and upon the political licentiousness of the 
press. The alien act produced its effect by its mere 
enactment, in the departure from the country of the 
most obnoxious foreigners and the power conferred 
by it upon the President was never exercised. The 
prosecutions under the sedition act did but aggravate 
the evil which they were intended to repress. Without 
believing that either of those laws was an infraction of 
the Constitution, it may be admitted without dispar- 
agement to the authority of Washington and Henry, 
or of the Congress which passed the acts, that they 
were not good and wholesome laws, inasmuch as they 
were not suited to the temper of the people. 

Emergencies may arise in which the authority of 
Congress will be invoked by the portion of the peo- 
ple most aggrieved by the alien and sedition acts, for 
arbitrary expulsion of foreign incendiaries, and for the 
suppression of incendiary publications at home, by 
measures far more rigorous and more palpably viola- 
tive of the Constitution than those laws, and if the tem- 
per of that portion of the people which approved them, 
shall be, as it has recently been and perhaps still is, 
attuned to endure the experiment, the Constitutional 



61 

authority of Congress will be found amply sufficient 
for the enactment of statutes far more sharp and 
biting than they were. The question with regard to 
the Constitutionality of those laws is however far dif- 
ferent from that of the manner in which they were 
resisted. In that originated the doctrine of nullifica- 
tion. 

In this respect there appears to have been a very 
material difference between the opinions and purposes 
of Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison. Concurring in 
the doctrine that the separate States have the right 
to interpose, in case of palpable infractions of the Con- 
stitution by the Government of the United States, 
and that the alien and sedition acts presented a case 
of such infraction, Mr. Jefferson considered them as 
absolutely null and void ; and thought the State 
Legislatures competent not only to declare but to 
make them so ; to resist their execution within their 
respective borders by physical force ; and to secede 
and separate from the Union, rather than submit to 
them, if attempted to be carried into execution by 
force. To these doctrines Mr. MadisOxN did not sub- 
scribe. He disclaimed them in the most explicit man- 
ner, at a very late period of his life, and in his last and 
most matured sentiments with regard to those laws, he 
considered them rather as unadvised Acts, passed in 
contravention to the opinions and feelings of the com- 
munity than as more unconstitutional than many other 
acts of Congress which have generally accorded with 
the views of a majority of the States and of the peo- 
ple. 

Upon the change of the administration by the elec- 
tion of Mr. Jefferson as President of the United States 
in 1 801 , a new career was opened to the talents and 



62 

wisdom of his friend, who thenceforth became his first 
assistant and his most confidential adviser in the 
administration of the Government. 

That administration was destined to pass through 
ordeals scarcely less severe than those which had test- 
ed the efficiency of the Constitution of the United 
States under the Presidency of his predecessors. 

By a singular concurrence of good fortune, Mr. Jef- 
ferson was immediately after his accession relieved 
from the pressure of all the important difficulties and 
menacing dangers which had so heavily weighed upon 
the administration of both his predecessors. The 
differences between them both and the United States, 
which had during the twelve years of those adminis- 
trations kept the nation without intermission in the 
most imminent dangers of War, first with Great 
Britain, and afterwards with France, had all been 
adjusted by Treaties with both those nations. The 
revolutionary violence of Republican France had 
already subsided into a military Government. Still 
retaining the name of a republic ; but rapidly ripening 
into a hereditary monarchy. The wars in Europe 
themselves were about to cease, for a short period in- 
deed, and soon to blaze out with renewed and aggra- 
vated fury, but upon questions of mere conquest and 
aggrandizement between the belligerent powers. In 
the same year with the inauguration of Mr. Jefferson, 
the Peace of Amiens, had replaced France at the head 
of continental Europe, leaving Great Britain in the 
uncontested if not undisputed dominion of the sea. 

The expenditures for the army and navy, already 
much reduced by the reduction of the former to a 
small Peace establishment, admitted of further re- 
trenchments, and the very questionable policy of 



63 

reducing also the latter, allowed a corresponding re- 
duction of taxation, which gave the new administra- 
tion the popular attraction of professed retrenchment 
and reform. For the naval armaments which the 
sharp collisions with both the belligerent nations had 
rendered necessary, although they had nobly sustain- 
ed the glory of valor and skill upon the ocean acquired 
during the revolutionary Mar, and were destined to 
deeds of yet more exalted fame in the administration 
of his successor, had necessarily occasioned heavy 
expense — had been among the measures most severely 
censured by Mr. Jefferson, and were among his most 
favorite objects of reform. Reformed they accor- 
dinglv were, and dry docks and gunboats, became 
for a time the cheap defences of the nation. The 
gallant spirit of tbe navy was itself discountenanced 
and discouraged, till a Tripolitan Cruiser captured 
after a desperate battle was not even taken into pos- 
session, upon a scruple of the victor's instructions 
whether self-defence could give a right to the fruits 
of victory, without a declaration of War by Congress. 
The reduction of the navy, while it lasted, deeply 
injurious both to the honor and the interest of the 
nation, gave however to the incipient administration 
the credit of reduced expenditures, retrenchment and 
reform : such was its first effect at home. Abroad its 
first fruit was the contempt of the Barbary powers — 
insult, outrage and war — a new armament, and new 
taxation under the denomination of a mediterranean 
fund, took the place of retrenchment ; and when the 
smothered flames of war burst forth anew between 
France and Britain, the impressment of our seamen, 
Orders in Council, Paper Blockades, Decrees of Ber- 
lin, of Milan, of Rambouillet, and finally the murder 



64 

of our mariners within our own waters, and the wan- 
ton and savage attack upon the frigate Chesapeake, 
proved in the degradation of our national reputation, 
and in the cowering of that undaunted spirit which 
rides upon the mountain wave, the short sightedness 
of that policy, which trusted to gunboats and dry 
docks for the defence of the country upon the world 
of waters, and which had crippled the naval arm, and 
tamed the gallant spirit of the Union, for the glory of 
retrenchment and reform. 

On the other hand the renewal of the European 
war, and the partialities of Mr. Jefferson in favor 
of France enabled him to accomplish an object 
which greatly enlarged the territories of the Union — 
which removed a most formidable source of future 
dissensions with France ; which exceedingly strength- 
ened the relative influence and power of the State 
and section of the Union, to which he himself belong- 
ed, and which in its consequences changed the char- 
acter of the Confederacy itself. This operation, by 
far the greatest that has been accomplished by any 
administration under the Constitution, was consum- 
mated at the price of fifteen millions of dollars in 
money, and of a direct, unqualified, admitted violation 
of the Constitution of the United States. According 
to the theory of Mr. Jefferson, as applied by him to 
the alien and sedition Acts, it was absolutely null and 
void. It might have been nullified by the Legislature of 
any one State in the Union, and if persisted in would 
have warranted and justified a combination of States, 
and their secession from the confederacy in resistance 
against it. 

That an amendment to the Constitution was neces- 
sary to legalize the annexation of Louisiana to the 



65 

Union, was the opinion both of Mr. Jefferson and of 
Mr. Madison. They finally acquiesced however in 
the latitudinous construction of that instrument, which 
holds the treaty making powers together with an act 
of Congress sufficient for this operation. It was ac- 
cordingly thus consummated by Mr. Jefferson, and 
has been sanctioned by the acquiescence of the people. 
Upwards of thirty years have passed away since this 
great change was effected. By a subsequent Treaty 
with Spain by virtue of the same powers and author- 
ity, the Floridas have been annexed also to the Union, 
and the boundaries of the United States have been 
extended from the Mississippi, to the Pacific ocean. 
There is now nothing in the Constitution of the United 
States to inhibit their extension to the two polar cir- 
cles from the Straits of Hudson to the Straits of Ma- 
gellan. Whether this very capacity of enlargement 
of territory and multiplication of States by the con- 
structive power of Congress, without check or control 
either by the States or by their people, will not finally 
terminate in the dissolution of the Union itself, time 
alone can determine. The credit of the acquisition 
of Louisiana whether to be considered as a source of 
good or of evil, is perhaps due to Robert R. Living- 
ston more than to any other man, but the merit of its 
accomplishment must ever remain as the great and 
imperishable memorial of the administration of Jeffer- 
son. 

In the interval between the Peace of Amiens, and 
the renewal of the wars of France witli the rest of 
Europe, the grasping spirit and gigantic genius of 
Napoleon had been revolving projects of personal 
aggrandizement and of national ambition of which 
this western hemisphere was to be the scene. He 



66 

had extorted from the languishing and nerveless 
dynasty of the Bourbons in Spain the retrocession of 
the Province of Louisiana, with a description of boun- 
dary sufficiently indefinite, to raise questions of limits 
whenever it might suit his purpose to settle them by 
the intimation of his will. Here, it had been his pur- 
pose to establish a military Colony, with the Mexican 
dominions of Spain on one side, and the United 
States of America, and the continental colonies of 
Great Britain on the other, in the centre of the wes- 
tern Hemisphere, the stand, for a lever to wield at 
his pleasure the destinies of the world. This plan 
was discomposed by a petty squabble with Great Bri- 
tain about the Island of Malta; and a project wilder 
if possible than his military Colony of Louisiana — 
namely the Caesarian operation of conquering the Brit- 
ish Islands themselves by direct invasion. The trans- 
fer of Louisiana had been stipulated by a secret 
Treaty ; but possession had not been taken. Mr. 
Livingston was then the minister of the United States 
in France. He had been made acquainted with the 
existence of the Treaty of retrocession of Louisiana, 
and by a memorial of great ability, had expostulated 
against it, urging as scarcely less essential to the inter- 
ests of France than of the United States, that the 
Province should be ceded to them. This memorial 
when presented had met with little attention from 
Napoleon. His military Colony, of twenty thousand 
men was on the point of embarkation, under the com- 
mand of one of his Lieutenants, destined himself in 
after time to wear the crown of Gustavus-Adolphus, 
when the Iron Crown of Lombardy and the Imperial 
Crown of France after encircling the brows of Napo- 
leon should have melted before the leaden sceptre of 



67 

the restored Bourbons. Napoleon was to rise to the 
summit of human greatness, and to fall from it over 
another precipice, than that to which he was ap- 
proaching with his military colony of Louisiana. 
When he determined to renew the war with Eng- 
land, still mistress of the seas, he could no longer risk 
the fortunes of his soldiers in a passage across the 
Atlantic, and unable as he was to cope with the thun- 
ders of Britain upon the Ocean, he saw that Louisiana 
itself if he should take possession of the Province 
must inevitably fall an easy prey to the enemy with 
whom he was to contend. He therefore abandoned 
his project of conquests in America, and determined 
at once to sell his Colony of Louisiana to the United 
States. 

Never in the fortunes of mankind was there a more 
sudden, complete and propitious turn in the tide of 
events than this change in the purposes of Napoleon 
proved to the administration of Mr. Jefferson. The 
wrangling altercation with Spain for the navigation of 
the Mississippi, had been adjusted during the admin- 
istration of Washington, by a treaty, which had con- 
ceded to them the right, and stipulated to make its 
enjoyment effective a right of deposit at New Orleans. 
In repurchasing from Spain the Colony of Louisiana, 
Napoleon, to disincumber himself from the burden of 
this stipulation, and to hold in his hand a rod over the 
western section of this Union, had compelled the das- 
tardly and imbecile monarch of Spain to commit an 
act of perfidy, by withdrawing from the people of the 
United States, this stipulated right of deposit before 
delivering the possession of the Colony to France. 
The great artery of the commerce of the Union was 
thus choaked in its circulation. The sentiment of 
9 



68 

surprise, of alarm, of indignation, was instantaneous 
and universal among the people. The hardy and en- 
terprising settlers of the western country could hardly 
be restrained from pouring down the swelling floods of 
their population, to take possession of New Orleans 
itself, by the immediate exercise of the rights of war. 
A war with Spain must have been immediately fol- 
lowed by a war with France ; which, however just 
the cause of the United States would have been, 
must necessarily give a direction to public affairs ad- 
verse to the whole system of Mr. Jefferson's policy, 
and in all probability prove fatal to the success of his 
administration. Instigations to immediate war, were 
at once attempted in Congress, and were strongly 
countenanced by the excited temper of the people. 
Mr. Jefferson instituted an extraordinary mission both 
to France and Spain to remonstrate against the with- 
drawal of the right of deposit, and to propose anew 
the purchase of the Island of New Orleans. By one 
of those coincidences in the course of human events, 
too rare to be numbered among the ordinary dispen- 
sations of Providence ; too common to be accountable 
upon the doctrine of unregulated chance, when Mr. 
Jefferson's minister arrived at the seat of his first des- 
tination, his charge and much more than his charge 
was already performed. Napoleon had resolved to 
sell to the United States the whole of Louisiana, and 
Great Britain, under the influence of fears and jeal- 
ousies of him, even deeper than those with which she 
pined at every prosperity of her alienated child, had 
declared her acquiescence in the transfer. The Amer- 
ican negociators without hesitation transcended their 
powers, to obtain all Louisiana instead of Florida. 
Claims of indemnity to the citizens of the United 



69 

States, for wrongs suffered from the preceding revo- 
lutionary Governments of France were provided for 
by a separate Convention, and paid for with part of 
the purchase money for the Province, and the whole 
remnant of the fifteen millions, was in the midst of a 
raging war, with the know ledge and assent of the 
British Government, furnished h\ Knglish Bankers to 
be expended in preparations for the conquest of Eng- 
land by invasion. 

It will be no detraction from the merits or services 
of Mr. Jefferson or of his Secretary of State to ac- 
knowledge that in all this transaction Fortune claims 
to herself the lion's share. To seize, and turn to 
profit the precise instant of the turning tide is itself 
among the eminent properties of a Statesman, and 
if requiring less elevated virtue than the firmness and 
prudence that withstand adversity, or the moderation 
which adorns and dignifies prosperity, it is not less 
essential to the character of an accomplished ruler of 
men. 

But Napoleon had transferred the acquisition which 
he had wrenched from the nerveless hand of Spain 
with its indefinite and equivocal boundary. He had 
also violated his faith, pledged to Spain, when he took 
back the Province, once the Colony of France ; that 
he would never cede it to the United States. Spain 
immediately complained, remonstrated, protested 
against the cession, the just reward of her own per- 
fidy, in withdrawing the stipulated right of deposit 
at New Orleans ; and although Napoleon soon silenc- 
ed her complaints and constrained her to withdraw 
her protest against the cession, yet on the question of 
boundary, he had contracted his province of Louisi- 
ana, almost within the dimensions of the Island of New 



70 

Orleans. Negotiations with Spain and France, soon 
complicated with the sharper collisions of neutral and 
belligerent rights, and with the war of extermination 
between France and Britain, called for all the tal- 
ents and all the energies of the President, and of his 
friend and Minister in the Department of State. The 
discussions respecting the boundaries of Louisiana 
were soon brought to a close. Spain contested the 
claims of the United States, both east and west of the 
Mississippi. The United States after an ineffectual 
attempt to obtain the Floridas from Spain, agreed to 
leave both the questions of boundary to the decision 
of France, and Napoleon instantly decided it on both 
sides of the Mississippi against them. 

In the first wars of the French revolution Great 
Britain had begun by straining the claim of belliger- 
ent as against neutral rights, beyond all the theories 
of international jurisprudence and even beyond her 
own ordinary practice. There is in all war a conflict 
between the belligerent and the neutral right, which 
can in its nature be settled only by convention. 
And in addition to all the ordinary asperities of dis- 
sension between the nation at war and the nation at 
peace, she had asserted a right of man-stealing from 
the vessels of the United States. The claim of right 
was to take by force all sea-faring men, her own sub- 
jects, wherever they were found by her naval officers, 
to serve their king in his wars. And under color of 
this tyrant's right, her naval officers, down to the 
most beardless Midshipman actually took from the 
American merchant vessels which they visited any 
seaman whom they chose to take for a British sub- 
ject. After the Treaty of November 1794, she had 
relaxed all her pretensions against the neutral rights, 



71 

and had gradually abandoned the practice of impress- 
ment till she was on the point of renouncing it by a 
formal Treaty stipulation. At the renewal of the 
war, after the Peace of Amiens, it was at first urged 
with much respect lor the rights of neutrality, but the 
practice of impressment was soon renewed with 
aggravated severity and the commerce of neutral na- 
tions with the Colonies of the adverse belligerent was 
wholly interdicted on the pretence of justification 
because it had been forbidden by the enemy herself 
in time of peace. This pretension had been first 
raised by Great Britain in the seven year's war, 
but she had been overawed by the armed neutrality 
from maintaining it in the war of the American revo- 
lution. In the midst of this war with Napoleon she 
suddenly reasserted the principle and by a secret 
order in Council, swept the ocean of nearly the whole 
mass of neutral commerce. Her war with France 
spread itelf all over Europe, successively involving 
Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Prussia, Austria, Rus- 
sia, Denmark and Sweden. Not a single neutral 
power remained in Europe — and Great Britain, after 
annihilating at Trafalgar the united naval power of 
France and Spain, ruling thenceforth with undisputed 
dominion upon the ocean, conceived the project of 
engrossing even the commerce with her enemy by 
intercepting all neutral navigation. These measures 
were met by corresponding acts of violence, and 
sophistical principles of National Law promulgated by 
Napoleon, rising to the summit of his greatness and 
preparing his downfall by the abuse of his elevation. 
Through this fiery ordeal the administration of Mr. 
Jefferson was to pass and the severest of its tests were 
to be applied to Mr. Madison. His correspondence 



72 

with the ministers of Great Britain, France and Spain, 
and with the ministers of the United States to those 
nations during the remainder of Mr. Jefferson's admin- 
istration constitute the most important and most valu- 
able materials of its history. His examination of the 
British doctrines relating to neutral trade, will hereaf- 
ter be considered a standard Treatise on the law of 
Nations ; not inferior to the works of any writer upon 
those subjects since the days of Grotius and every 
way worthy of the author of Publius and of Helvidius. 
There is indeed in all the diplomatic papers of Ameri- 
can Statesmen justly celebrated as they have been, 
nothing superior to this Dissertation, which was not 
strictly official. It was composed amidst the du- 
ties of the Department of State, never more arduous 
than at that time — in the summer of 1 806. It was 
published inomcially and a copy of it was laid on the 
table of each member of Congress at the commence- 
ment of the session in December 1 806. 

The controversies of conflicting neutral and bellig- 
erent rights continued through the whole of Mr. Jef- 
ferson's administration, during the latter part of which 
they were verging rapidly to war. He had carried 
the policy of peace, perhaps to an extreme. His sys- 
tem of defence by commercial restrictions, dry docks, 
gun-boats and embargoes was stretched to its last 
hair's breadth of endurance. Far be it from me my 
fellow citizens, to speak of this system or of its mo- 
tives with disrespect. If there be a duty, binding in 
chains more adamantine than all the rest the con- 
science of a Chief Magistrate of this Union, it is that 
of preserving peace with all mankind — peace with the 
other nations of the earth — peace among the several 
States of this Union — peace in the hearts and temper 



13 

of our own people. Yet must a President of the 
United States never cease to feel that his charge is to 
maintain the rights, the interests and the honor no less 
than the peace of his countn — nor will he be permit- 
ted to forget that peace must be the offspring of two 
concurring wills. That to seek peace is not always 
to ensue it. He must remember too, that a reliance 
upon the operation of measures, from their effect on 
the interests however clear and unequivocal of nations, 
cannot be safe, against a counter-current of their pas- 
sions. That nations, like individuals, sacrifice their 
peace to their pride, to their hatred, to their envy, to 
their jealousy, and even to the craft, which the cun- 
ning of hackneyed politicians not (infrequently mis- 
takes for policy. That nations, like individuals have 
sometimes the misfortune of losing their senses, and 
that lunatic communities, which cannot be confined 
in hospitals, must be resisted in arms, as a single ma- 
niac is sometimes restored to reason by the scourge. 
That national madness is infectious, and that a par- 
oxysm of it in one people, especially when generated 
by the Furies, that preside over war, produces a coun- 
ter paroxysm in their adverse party. Such is the 
melancholy condition as yet of associated man. And 
while in the wise but mysterious dispensations of an 
overruling Providence, man shall so continue, the 
peace of every nation must depend not alone upon its 
own will, but upon that concurrently with the will 
of all others. 

And such was the condition of the two mightiest 
nations of the earth during the administration of Mr. 
Jefferson. Frantic, in fits of mutual hatred, envy and 
jealousy against each other ; meditating mutual inva- 
sion and conquest, and forcing the other nations of 



74 

the four quarters of the globe to the alternative of 
joining them as allies or encountering them as foes. 
Mr. Jefferson met them with moral philosophy, and 
commercial restrictions, with dry docks and gun-boats 
— with non-intercourses and embargoes, till the 
American nation were told that they could not be 
kicked into a war, and till they were taunted by a 
British Statesman in the Imperial Parliament of Eng- 
land, with their five fir frigates and their striped 
bunting. 

Mr. Jefferson pursued his policy of peace till it 
brought the nation to the borders of internal war. An 
embargo of fourteen months duration was at last reluc- 
tantly abandoned by him, when it had ceased to be 
obeyed by the people, and State Courts were ready to 
pronounce it unconstitutional. A non-intercourse was 
then substituted in its place and the helm of State 
passed from the hands of Mr. Jefferson to those of Mr. 
Madison, precisely at the moment of this perturba- 
tion of earth and sea, threatened with war from abroad 
and at home, but with the principle definitively set- 
tled that in our intercourse with foreign nations, rea- 
son, justice and commercial restrictions require live 
oak hearts and iron or brazen mouths to speak, that 
they may be distinctly heard, or attentively listened 
to, by the distant ear of foreigners, whether French or 
British, monarchical or republican. 

The administration of Mr. Madison, was with re- 
gard to its most essential principles a continuation of 
that of Mr. Jefferson. He too was the friend of 
peace, and earnestly desirous of maintaining it. As a 
last resource for the preservation of it, an act of Con- 
gress prohibited all commercial intercourse with both 
belligerents, the prohibition to be withdrawn from 



75 

either or both in the event of a repeal by either of the 
orders and decrees in violation of neutral rights. 
France ungraciously and equivocally withdrew her's. 
Britain refused, hesitated and at last conditionally 
withdrew her's when it was too late — after a formal 
declaration of war had beeD issued by Congress at 
the recommendation of President Madison himself. 

Of the necessity, the policy or even the justice of 
this war, there are conflicting opinions not yet, per- 
haps never to be harmonized. This is not the time 
or the place to discuss them. The passions, the prej- 
udices and the partialities of that day have passed 
away. That it was emphatically a popular war, hav- 
ing reference to the whole people of the United 
States, will, I think, not be denied. That it was in 
a high degree unpopular in our own section of the 
Union is no doubt equally true ; and that it was so, 
constituted the greatest difficulties and prepared the 
most mortifying disasters in its prosecution. 

The war itself was an ordeal through which the 
Constitution of the United States, as the Government 
of a great nation was to pass. Its trial in that res- 
pect was short but severe. In the intention of its 
founders and particularly of Mr. Madison, it was a 
Constitution essentially pacific in its character, and 
for a nation above all others, the lover of peace — yet 
its great and most vigorous energies and all its most 
formidable powers are reserved for the state of war — 
and war is the condition in which the functions allot- 
ted to the separate States sink into impotence com- 
pared with those of the general Government. 

The war was brought to a close without any defini- 
tive adjustment of the controverted principles in which 
it had originated. It left the questions of neutral 
10 



76 

commerce with an enemy and his colonies, of bottom 
and cargo, of blockade and contraband of war and 
even of impressment, precisely as they had been before 
the war. With the European war all the conflicts 
between belligerent and neutral rights had ceased. 
Great Britain, triumphant as she was after a strug- 
gle of more than twenty years duration — against rev- 
olutionary, republican and Imperial France, was in 
no temper to yield the principles for which in the heat 
of her contest she had defied the power of Neu- 
trality and the voice of Justice. As little were the 
Government or people of the United States disposed 
to yield principles, upon which, if there had been any 
error in their previous intercourse with the belligerent 
powers, it was that of faltering for the preservation 
of peace, in the defence of the rights of neutrality, and 
of conceding too much to the lawless pretensions of 
naval war. 

The extreme solicitude of the American Govern- 
ment for the perpetuity of peace, especially with 
Great Britain, induced Mr. Madison to institute with 
her negotiations after the peace of Ghent, for the ad- 
justment of all these questions of maritime collisions 
between the warlike and the pacific nation. The 
claims of neutral right are all founded upon the pre- 
cepts of Christianity and the natural rights of man. 
The warring party's claim is founded upon the imme- 
morial usages of war, untempercd and unmitigated 
by the chastening spirit of Christianity. They all 
rest upon the right of force — or upon what has been 
termed the ultimate argument of kings. But since 
the whole Island of Albion has been united under 
one Government, her foreign wars have necessarily 
all been upon or beyond the seas. Her consolida- 



77 

tion and her freedom have made her the first of mar- 
itime States, and the first of humane, learned, intelli- 
gent, but warlike nations of modern days. At home, 
she is generous, beneficent, tender hearted and above 
all proud of her liberty and loyalty united as in one. 
Free as the air upon her mountains, she tyrannizes 
over one elass of her people and that, the very elass 
upon which she depends for the support of her free- 
dom. She proclaims that tin 1 foot, be it of a slave, by 
alHitimr on her soil emancipates the man ; and as if 
it were the exclusive right of her soil, the loot of lun- 
own mariner by passing from it upon the deck ol a 
ship, slips into the fetters of a slave. There is no 
writ of Habeas Corpus for a British sailor. The 
stimulant to his love of his king and country is the 
Press Gang. 

This glaring inconsistency with the first principles 
of the British Constitution is justified on the plea of 
necessity, which being above all law, claims equal 
exemption from responsibility to the tribunal of rea- 
son. The efforts of Mr. Madison and of his succes- 
sors to obtain an amicable adjustment of this great 
source of hostility between the kindred nations have 
hitherto proved equally unavailing. One short inter- 
val has occurred since the peace, during which a war 
broke out between France and Spain to which Britain 
was neutral, and the views of her ruling Statesmen 
were then favorable to the rights of neutrality. Had 
that war been of longer continuance the prospects of 
a mitigation of the customs of maritime warfare might 
have been more propitious ; but we can now only 
indulge the hope that the glory of extinguishing the 
flame of war by land and sea is reserved for the future 
destinies of our confederated land. 



78 



The peace with Great Britain was succeeded by a 
short war with Algiers in which the first example was 
set of a peace with that piratical Power purchased by 
chastisement substituted for tribute — and which set 
the last seal to the policy of maintaining the rights 
and interests of the United States by a permanent 
naval force. 

The revolutions in Spain, and in her Colonies of 
this hemisphere, complicated with questions of dis- 
puted boundaries, and with claims of indemnity for 
depredations upon our commerce, formed subjects for 
important negotiations, during the war with Great 
Britain, and after its close. Never, since the institu- 
tion of civil society, have there been within so short 
a time so many assumptions of sovereign powers. 
The crown of Spain was abdicated by Charles the 
Fourth, and then by his son Ferdinand, while a pris- 
oner to Napoleon, at Bayonne, transferred to the 
house of Bonaparte, as the kingdom of Naples had 
been by conquest before. In Germany, the dissolu- 
tion of the German Empire had generated a kingdom 
of Westphalia, and converted into kingdoms the elec- 
torates of Saxony, of Bavaria, of Wirtemberg and of 
Hanover. The kingdom of Portugal had been over- 
shadowed by an empire of Brazil, and every petty 
Province of Spain in this hemisphere down to the 
Floridas and Amelia Island constituted themselves 
into sovereign States, unfurled their flags and claimed 
their seats among the potentates of the earth. Un- 
der these circumstances, it became often a question of 
great delicacy, who should be recognized as such, and 
with whom an exchange of diplomatic functionaries 
should be made. There was during Mr. Madison's 
administration a period during which war was waged 



79 

in Spain for the restoration of a Prince who had him- 
self renounced his throne. A regency acting in his 
name was recognized by Great Britain, under whose 
auspices he was finally restored. Napoleon had giv- 
en the crown of Spain, wrested by fraud and violence 
from the Bourbons, to his brother, who was recog- 
nized as king of Spain by all the continental powers 
of Europe, and it was in the conflict between these 
two usurpers, that the transatlantic Colonies of Spain 
in this hemisphere, disclaiming allegiance to either of 
the contending parties, asserted their own rights as 
independent communities. Mr. Madison, believed 
it to be the duty and the policy of the United States, 
while the fact remained to be decided by the issue of 
war, to withhold the acknowledgment of sovereign 
power alike from them all. The reception of a min- 
ister appointed by the regency of Spain was therefore 
delayed, until he was commissioned by Ferdinand 
himself after his restoration, and the total expulsion 
of his rival Joseph Buonaparte. But most of the 
American Colonies of Spain, released from their bonds 
of subjection to a European king, by the first de- 
thronement and abdication of Charles the Fourth, 
refused ever after all submission to the monarchs of 
Spain, and those on the American Continents which 
submitted for a time shortly after declared and have 
maintained their Independence, yet however unac- 
knowledged by Spain. No general union of the sev- 
eral Colonies of Spain, analogous to that of the Brit- 
ish Colonies in these United States, has been or is 
ever likely to be established. The several Vice Roy- 
alties have in their dissolution, melted into masses of 
confederated or consolidated Governments. They 
have been ravaged by incessant internal dissensions 



80 

and civil war. As they attempt to unite in one, or as 
they separate into parts, new States present them- 
selves, claiming the prerogatives of sovereignty, and 
the powers of Independent nations. The European 
kingdoms of France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands 
and Greece, have been in the same convulsionary 
state, with contending claims of sovereign power, so 
that the question of recognition, in almost numberless 
cases, and under a multitude of forms, has been before 
the Government of the United States for decision. 

The act of recognition, being an execution of the 
laws of nations, is an attribute of executive power, and 
has therefore been invariably performed under the 
present Constitution of the United States by their 
President. Mr. Madison withheld this recognition 
from the minister of the Spanish Regency, but yield- 
ed it to the same person, when commissioned by Fer- 
dinand. Pie left to his successors the obligation, of 
withholding and of conceding the acknowledgment, 
as the duties of this nation might from time to time 
forbid or enjoin ; and a question of the deepest inter- 
est, under circumstances pregnant with unparalleled 
consequences, is while I speak under the consideration 
and subject to the decision of the President of the 
United States. 

The severest trials of our country induced by the 
war with Great Britain were endured by the disorder 
of the national finances. The revenues of the Union 
until then had consisted almost exclusively in the pro- 
ceeds of taxation by impost on imported merchandize. 
Excises, land taxes and taxes upon stamps were 
resorted to during the war, but were always found 
more burdensome and less acceptable to the people. 
It is however a disadvantage, perhaps counterbalan- 



81 

ced by consequences more permanently beneficial in 
our political system, that the revenue from impost, 
more easily collected and more productive than any 
other in time of peace, must necessarily fail, almost 
entirely, in war with a nation of superior maritime 
force. Our admirable system of settlement and dis- 
posal of the public lands had beeu long established 
but was at that time and for many years since little 
known by its fruits. It is doubtful whether until the 
last year the proceeds of the sales have been sufficient 
to defray the cost of the purchase and the expenses 
of management. The prices at which they are sold 
have been reduced, while the wages of labor have 
risen, till the purchaser for settlement receives them 
upon terms nearly gratuitous. They are now an ines- 
timable source of a copious revenue, and if honestly 
and carefully managed for the people to whom they 
belong, may hereafter alleviate the burden of taxation 
in all its forms. But when the war with Great Brit- 
ain was declared in 1812, the population of this Union 
was less than one half its numbers at the present day. 
It increases now at the average rate of half a million 
of souls every year. For this state of unexampled 
prosperity a tribute of gratitude and applause is due 
to the administration of Madison, for the wise and 
conciliatory policy upon which it was conducted from 
the close of the war, until the end of his second Pres- 
idential term in March 1817, when he voluntarily 
retired from public life. 

From that day, for a period advancing upon its 
twentieth year, he lived in a happy retirement ; in 
the bosom of a family and with a partner for life alike 
adapted to the repose and comfort of domestic pri- 
vacy, as she had been to adorn and dignify the high- 



82 

est of public stations. Between the occupations of 
agriculture, the amusements of literature and the 
exercise of beneficence, the cultivation of the soil, of 
the mind and of the heart, the leisure of his latter 
days was divided. In 1829 a Convention was held 
in Virginia for the revisal of the Constitution of the 
Commonwealth, in which transaction the people of 
the State again enjoyed the benefit of his long expe- 
rience and his calm and conciliatory counsels. The 
unanimous sense of that body would have deferred to 
him the honor of presiding over their deliberations, 
but the infirmities of age had already so far encroach- 
ed upon the vigor of his constitution, that he declined 
in the most delicate manner the nomination by pro- 
posing himself the election of his friend and succes- 
sor to the Chief Magistracy of the Union, James Mon- 
roe. He was accordingly chosen without any other 
nomination, but was afterwards himself so severely 
indisposed that he was compelled to resign both the 
Presidency and his seat in the Convention before they 
had concluded their labors. 

On one occasion of deep interest to the people of 
the State, on the question of the ratio of representa- 
tion in the two branches of the Legislature, Mr. Mad- 
ison took an active part and made a speech the sub- 
stance of which has been preserved. 

" Such in those moments as in all the past," 

This speech is so perfectly characteristic of the man 
that it might itself be considered as an epitome of his 
life. Though delivered upon a question, which in a 
discussion upon a Constitution of this Commonwealth 
could not even be raised, it was upon a subject which 
probed to the deepest foundations the institution of 



83 

civil society. It was upon the condition of the color- 
ed population of the Commonwealth and upon their 
relations as persons and as property to the State. 
Every part of the speech is fill! of the spirit which 
animated him through life. Nor can I resist the 
temptation to repeat a few short passages from it, 
which may serve as samples of the whole. 

" It is sufficiently obvious said Mr. Madison, that 
persons and property are the two great objects on 
which Governments are to act ; that the rights of 
persons and the rights of property are the objects for 
the protection of which Government was instituted. 
These rights cannot well be separated. The person- 
al right to acquire property which is a natural right, 
gives to property when acquired, a right to protection, 
as a social right." 

"his due to justice ; due to humanity; due to 
truth ; to the sympathies of our nature in fine, to our 
character as a people, both abroad and at home ; that 
the colored part of our population should be consider- 
ed, as much as possible, in the light of human beings, 
and not as mere property. As such, they are acted 
upon by our laws, and have an interest in our laws." 
" In framing a Constitution, great difficulties are 
necessarily to be overcome ; and nothing can ever 
overcome them but a spirit of compromise. Other 
nations are surprised at nothing so much as our hav- 
ing been able to form constitutions in the manner 
which has been exemplified in this country. Even 
the union of so many States, is, in the eyes of the 
world, a wonder ; the harmonious establishment ot a 
common Government over them all, a miracle. I can- 
not but flatter myself that without a miracle, we shall 
be able to arrange all difficulties. I never have des- 
11 



84 

paired, notwithstanding all the threatening appearan- 
ces we have passed through. I have now more than 
a hope — a consoling confidence — that we shall at 
last find that our labors have not been in vain." 

Mr. Madison was associated with his friend Jeffer- 
son in the institution of the University of Virginia, 
and after his decease was placed at its head under 
the modest and unassuming title of Rector. He was 
also the President of an Agricultural Society in the 
county of his residence, and in that capacity delivered 
an address which the practical farmer and the classical 
scholar may read with equal profit and delight. 

In the midst of these occupations the declining days 
of the Philosopher, the Statesman and the Patriot 
were past, until the 21st day of June last, the anni- 
versary of tin; day on which the ratification of the 
Convention of Virginia in 1788 had affixed the seal 
of James Madison as the father of the Constitution 
of the United States, when his earthly part sunk 
without a struggle into the grave, and a spirit bright 
as the seraphim that surround the throne of omnipo- 
tence, ascended to the bosom of his God. 

This Constitution, my countrymen, is the great 
result of the North American revolution. This is the 
giant stride in the improvement of the condition of 
the human race, consummated in a period of less than 
one hundred years. Of the signers of the address to 
George the Third in the Congress of 1774 — of the 
signers of the Declaration of Independence in 177G — 
of the signers of the Articles of Confederation in 
1781, and of the signers of the federal and national 
Constitution of Government under which we live, 
with enjoyments never before allotted to man, not 
one remains in the land of the living. The last survi- 



85 

ver of them all was he to honor w hose memorj \\ e are 
hero assembled at oner with mourning and with joy. 
We reverse the order of sentiment and reflection of 

the ancient Persian king — w e look back on the centu- 
ry gone by — we look around with anxious and eager 
eye for one of that illustrious host of Patriots and he- 
roes under whose guidance the revolution of Amer- 
ican Independence was begun and continued and 
completed. We look around in vain. To them this 
crowded theatre, full of human life, in all its stages of 
existence, full of the glowing exultation of youth, of 
the steady maturity of manhood, the sparkling eyes 
of beaut) and the grey hairs of reverend age — all this 
to them is as the solitude of the sepulchre. We think 
of this and say, how short is human life ! But then, 
then, we turn back our thoughts again, to the scene 
over which the falling curtain has but now closed 
upon the drama of the day. From the saddening 
thought that they are no more, we call for comfort 
upon the memory of what they were, and our hearts 
leap for joy, that they were our lathers. We see 
them, true and faithful subjects of their sovereign, 
first meeting with firm but respectful remonstrance 
the approach of usurpation upon their rights. We 
see them, fearless in their fortitude, and confident in 
the righteousness of their cause, bid defiance to the 
arm of power, and declare themselves Independent 
States. We see them, waging for seven years a war of 
desolation and of glory, in most unequal contest with 
their own unnatural stepmother, the mistress of the 
seas, till under the sign manual of their king their 
Independence was acknowledged — and last and best 
of all, we see them, toiling in war and in peace to 
form and perpetuate an union, under forms of Gov- 



86 

eminent intricately but skilfully adjusted so as to 
secure to themselves and their posterity the priceless 
blessings of inseparable Liberty and Law. 

Their days on earth are ended, and yet their cen- 
tury has not passed away. Their portion of the bles- 
sings which they thus labored to secure, they have 
enjoyed — and transmitted to us their posterity. We 
enjoy them as an inheritance — won, not by our toils — 
watered, not with our tears — saddened, not by the 
shedding of any blood of ours. The gift of heaven 
through their sufferings and their achievements — but 
not without a charge of correspondent duty incum- 
bent upon ourselves. 

And what, my friends and fellow citizens, what is 
that duty of our own ? Is it to remonstrate to the 
adders's ear of a king beyond the Atlantic wave, and 
claim from him the restoration of violated rights ? 
No. Is it to sever the ties of kindred and of blood, 
with the people from whom we sprang : To cast 
away the precious name of Britons and be no more the 
countrymen of Shakspeare and Milton, of Newton and 
Locke — of Chatham and Burke ? Or more and worse, 
is it to meet their countrymen in the deadly conflict 
of a seven year's war ? No. Is it the last and great- 
est of the duties fulfilled by them ? Is it to lay the 
foundations of the fairest Government and the migh- 
tiest nation that ever floated on the tide of time ? 
No ! These awful and solemn duties were allotted to 
them; and by them they were faithfully performed. 
What then is our duty ? 

Is it not to preserve, to cherish, to improve the in- 
heritance which they have left us — won by their toils 
— watered by their tears — saddened but fertilized by 
their blood ? Are we the sons of worthy sires, and 



87 

in the onward march of time have they achieved in 
the career of human improvement so much, only that 
our posterity and theirs may blush for the contrast 
between their unexampled energies and our nerve- 
less impotence ? between their more than Herculean 
labors and our indolent repose ? No, my fellow citi- 
zens — far be from us ; far be from you, for he who 
now addresses you has but a few short days before he 
shall be called to join the multitudes of ages past — far 
be from you the reproach or the suspicion of such a 
degrading contrast. You too have the solemn duty to 
perform, of improving the condition of your species, by 
improving your own. Not in the great and strong 
wind of a revolution, which rent the mountains and 
brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord — for the 
Lord is not in the wind — not in the earthquake of a 
revolutionary war, marching to the onset between the 
battle field and the scaffold — for the Lord is not in the 
earthquake — Not in the fire of civil dissension — In 
war between the members and the head — In nullifi- 
cation of the laws of the Union by the forcible resist- 
ance of one refractory State — for the Lord is not in 
the fire ; and that fire was never kindled by your 
fathers ! No ! it is in the still small voice that suc- 
ceeded the whirlwind, the earthquake and the fire. 
The voice that stills the raging of the waves and the 
tumults of the people — that spoke the words of 
peace — of harmony — of union. And for that voice, 
may you and your children's children " to the last 
syllable of recorded time," fix your eyes upon the 
memory, and listen with your ears to the life of 
James Madison. 



ORDER OF PERFORMANCES 



TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27th, 1836, 

OCCASIONED BT THE DECEASE OF 

FORMERLY 

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 



INVOLUNTARY ON THE ORGAN— By G. J. Webb. 



II.. .PRAYER— By Rev. Dr. Lowell. 



III. ..ODE— By the Choir of the Boston Academy of Music. 
Poetry by Park Benjamin. Music by G. J. Webb. 

How shall we mourn the glorious dead ? 

What trophy rear above his grave, 
For whom a nation's tears are shed — 

A nation's funeral banners wave ! 

Let Eloquence his deeds proclaim, 

From sea-beat strand to mountain goal ; 

Let Hist'ry write his peaceful name, 
High on her truth-illumined scroll. 

Let Poetry and Art through Earth 

The page inspire, the canvass warm — 

In glowing words record his worth, 
In living marble mould his form. 

A fame so bright will never fade, 
A name so dear will deathless be ; 



90 

For on our country's shrine he laid 
The charter of her liberty. 

Praise be to God ! His love bestowed 
The chief, the patriot, and the sage ; 

Praise God ! to Him our fathers owed 
This fair and goodly heritage. 

The sacred gift, time shall not mar, 
But Wisdom guard what Valor won— 

While beams serene her guiding star, 
And Glory points to Madison ! 



15ulofli>«13fi tlje Jfyon* Jolju (kuuug 8trams, 



V.. .HYMN. 

O God, our help in ages past, 
Our hope for years to come ; 

Our shelter from the stormy blast, 
And our eternal home ; — 

Beneath the shadow of Thy throne, 

Our land abides secure ; 
Sufficient is Thine arm alone, 

And our defence is sure. 

Thy word commands our flesh to dust, 

Return ye sons of men ; 
All nations rose from earth at first, 

And turned to earth again. 

O God, our help in ages past, 
Our hope for years to come, 

Be Thou our guard while troubles last, 
And our eternal home. 



VI...BENEDICTIOJV. 




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